tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3618811940050829352024-02-08T02:05:36.760-08:00Gregory WoodsAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-30511468991132677262016-08-09T05:58:00.003-07:002016-08-09T05:58:25.511-07:00A brief interview with <i>Vice</i> about the Homintern: <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-gay-culture-shaped-the-modern-world">http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-gay-culture-shaped-the-modern-world</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-78177341774783953362016-06-04T09:17:00.001-07:002016-06-04T09:17:15.956-07:00i-D Interview about the HominternA brief interview with <i>i-D</i> magazine about the Homintern: <a href="http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/how-gay-culture-liberated-the-modern-world">http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/how-gay-culture-liberated-the-modern-world</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-86849213456427083722016-05-06T01:24:00.002-07:002016-05-06T01:24:35.777-07:00Homintern: Timeline and PrefaceA timeline and an extract from the Preface of my book <i>Homintern</i>, on the UK blog of Yale University Press: <a href="http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2016/04/18/how-gay-culture-liberated-the-modern-world-a-timeline/">http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2016/04/18/how-gay-culture-liberated-the-modern-world-a-timeline/</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-81147153801026442862016-05-06T01:15:00.003-07:002016-05-06T01:15:44.941-07:00LGBT Staff in AcademiaA feature to which I contributed, in the <i>Times Higher Education Supplement</i>, on the experience of LGBT staff in the academic world: <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/how-welcoming-is-academia-to-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-lgbt-staff">https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/how-welcoming-is-academia-to-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-lgbt-staff</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-13152614463498028272016-05-06T00:59:00.004-07:002016-05-06T00:59:46.137-07:00From Gay Conspiracy to Queer ChicAn essay on LGBT culture, commissioned by the <i>Guardian</i> to mark the publication of my <i>Homintern</i>: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/08/gay-conspiracy-homosexual-culture-liberated-arts?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook">http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/08/gay-conspiracy-homosexual-culture-liberated-arts?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-4284675517227026202016-05-06T00:55:00.002-07:002016-05-06T00:55:34.314-07:00Interview with Gay TimesHere is an interview <i>Gay Times</i> did with me to mark the publication of my <i>Homintern</i>: <a href="https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/culture/33713/homintern-how-gay-culture-liberated-the-modern-world-author-gregory-woods-gives-us-a-history-lesson/#comments">https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/culture/33713/homintern-how-gay-culture-liberated-the-modern-world-author-gregory-woods-gives-us-a-history-lesson/#comments</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-84124002528036010392016-05-06T00:49:00.002-07:002016-05-06T00:49:24.973-07:00Ten Landmarks in Gay and Lesbian Literature<br />
A brief list of good gay and lesbian reading I compiled for the <i>Guardian</i>: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/04/top-10-landmarks-in-gay-and-lesbian-literature">http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/04/top-10-landmarks-in-gay-and-lesbian-literature</a><br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-14386030476699501292016-03-29T04:11:00.004-07:002016-03-29T04:11:36.388-07:00The Man on the Rock[This is the introduction I wrote for the 2014 Valancourt Press reissue of Francis King's novel.]<br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Educated at Shrewsbury
School and Balliol College, Oxford, Francis King (1923-2011) began
life from a position of privilege, but a spell of agricultural labour
as a conscientious objector during the Second World War did
differentiate him from young men destined for an easy passage into
the Establishment. So did his homosexuality. That said, by developing
a career with the British Council, working for them in Italy, Greece,
Finland and Japan, he retained access to the upper reaches of British
society throughout his life. Although the Establishment has never
been too keen on artists, even the fact that he was a novelist did
not prevent this. King would eventually become chairman of the
Society of Authors, president of International PEN, a fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature; and he was awarded the OBE in 1979, the
CBE in 1985.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i> The Man on the Rock</i>
(1957) was the seventh of his novels to be published, one of them
under a pseudonym. (By then he had also published a collection of
poems.) The emotional core of the novel is provided by its central
relationship between the American Irvine Stroh and the book’s Greek
narrator, Spiro Polymerides. Irvine is a repressed homosexual, and
Spiro is a bisexual who is not completely unwilling to take things to
the next, physical step. In that sense, theirs is a homosexual
relationship, albeit an unconsummated one. It is precisely the fact
that they have not slept together that gives their bond both its
tension and its weakness. In an early passage, Spiro says: ‘It’s
odd that he and I never slept together; everyone in Athens was
certain that we were lovers, and since he knew that, obviously the
fear of what people would say could not have deterred him.’ Spiro
is not averse to the idea of a sexual relationship with the older
man; and, indeed, he has had a certain amount of relevant experience:
‘If he had wanted me to sleep with him, I suppose I should have
consented: after all, when I was down and out in Salonica, I slept
with men far less attractive, to whom I was under far less of an
obligation.’ The sense of obligation is the point: he feels Irvine
ought to be getting more than his does for his side of the bargain,
and this makes him uncomfortable: ‘Yes, I could have slept with
Irvine if he had wanted it; I think I should have preferred to do so,
for then I should not have felt myself under so much of an obligation
to him.’</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As is often the case
in King’s novels, love is shown as involving a good deal of
voluntary self-abasement. This is especially so when an older person
of either sex is in love with a younger. King also generally regards
love as being a condition conducive to the manipulation of one
partner by the other. Money is often involved. The relationships he
depicts often end up in a state where each partner feels imprisoned
by the other. (Spiro: ‘I feel as if—as if I were suffocating. One
seems to be living in a prison all the time.’ Helen: ‘Oh, no. I’m
the one that’s in a prison, I’m the prisoner.’) For just a
moment’s freedom, a quick breath of air, lies have to be told,
recriminations endured. Moments of piecemeal reconciliation are
mistaken for the restoration of intimacy. Copious tears are shed, as
if required by way of proof. But proof of what? Not love itself so
much as what W.B. Yeats once called, disapprovingly, ‘passionate
intensity’. Throughout the book, while he narrates it, Spiro is
living off his wife who, although heavily pregnant, has to go out to
work to keep them both. Yet it is he who feels the more trapped by
this arrangement, wasting his days in their shabby home.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The book’s
historical context is that of the Cold War and the decolonisation
movement. Greece is being closely watched by the Americans in the
aftermath of its civil war. And mention is made, from time to time,
of the developing crisis of armed struggle against British rule in
Cyprus. (Independence would be achieved at last in 1960.) While
trying to annoy Irvine, Spiro affects to be concerned that ‘people
are being shot and hounded and whipped’, but such concerns about
public events are apparently only skin deep.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I have two
reservations about <i>The Man on the Rock</i>: its narrative voice
and the content of its second chapter. Having worked for the British
Council in Salonika and Athens, King had garnered a decent education
in Greek history and culture. But he shows no appreciable effort to
make the narrator, Spiro, sound convincingly like an uneducated Greek
for whom English is a second language. Neither the diction nor the
syntax offers any concession to the creation of this character, who
merely sounds like an Englishman of the author’s own background.
This is very lazy writing. I do not mean to suggest that the whole
book should have been written in broken English, but neither should
his English be so full of the idioms of the English Establishment; or
not without some explanation for Spiro’s facility with his borrowed
tongue.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Also, Spiro looks at
his own country as if he had recently arrived there from from
Kensington, and at his own countrymen as if he had never been one of
them. For instance, speaking of his own brother, he says: ‘Stelio
threw himself down on to the bed which we had shared for as long as I
could remember, and lay there, silent, in the thick woollen vest and
underpants which Greek peasants wear even in summer’. And when the
peasant boy Dino excitedly puts on a nylon shirt, Spiro says:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm; page-break-before: auto;">
There was something at once ridiculous and touching in the contrast
between the heavy, sun-burned, muscular, peasant body and the vulgar
powder-blue cocoon which appeared to have been spun in sugar around
it: something ridiculous and touching too in the Greek’s childish
preening, as he gazed either down at himself or at his extended arm
with a smile of idiotic beatitude on his features.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This problem arises
almost every time Spiro uses the words ‘Greek’ or ‘Greece’.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My second main
reservation about the book concerns its second chapter, which opens
with a sequence of atrocities about which it is hard to care, even
though it happens to the family and home community of the narrator.
This deadness of effect is not merely because Spiro himself is numbed
by the events but, structurally, because the reader has not yet heard
enough about him to care much about what happens to him, let alone to
family members to whom we are introduced even in the very moments of
their deaths. This chapter would have served the book better if it
had been moved further into it, perhaps as a flashback to explain and
add nuance to Spiro’s character. By that point, at which the reader
would be familiar with him, it would be easier to sympathise with
what once happened to him and his family. As the book continues,
there is little sign that Spiro’s wartime experience has a
significant bearing on what he does after it. These are not
insuperable obstacles to the reader’s enjoyment, however.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The narrative is
rounded off with a moral crackdown. The Cold War era saw many
clean-ups carried out by the Americans or, on their behalf, by their
allies, on the pretext that the Soviets were systematically
undermining the West with acts of moral subversion, intentionally
leading to the blackmailing of insiders into handing over crucial
information. Surveillance was carried out by both sides for the
slightest sign of an opportunity of this kind. Homosexual men were
thought to be especially liable to entrapment, and were therefore
especially likely to be spied on by their own governments. Every now
and then, arrests would be made—for sexual transgressions far more
often than for espionage, which actually had its main roots
elsewhere.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Speaking of his friend
Jock’s mother Helen, with whom he starts an affair, Spiro says:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; page-break-before: auto;">
I was astonished that a woman who knew so much about everybody did
not know that I stayed in Irvine’s flat. Or was she being
disingenuous? Weeks later I asked her, and she replied: ‘Oh, I’d
heard gossip about that, of course. But I never believed it. It never
struck me that Irvine would do anything so foolish. Especially since
these purges have started.’ It was typical that Helen should have
heard about the purges long before Irvine or I or any of our American
acquaintances.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
By the end of the book,
such a crackdown has indeed been carried out by the Americans:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm; page-break-before: auto;">
there had followed a general ‘clean-up’: a marine was sent off to
Naples for ‘psychological treatment’; an army major disappeared,
almost overnight; two or three Greek clerks were suddenly without
their jobs at the Embassy...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But moral panics tend
to work on great cities only cosmetically. The Americans may have
cleaned up their act to some extent, or at least to the extent of
satisfying their masters back in Washington D.C., but Athens is still
Athens. It still plays host to what Spiro calls ‘that strange
life—predatory, furtive, feverish—which quickens in all parks at
twilight’.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Francis King once
acknowledged his ‘profound, if resigned, pessimism about the
world’. It is this outlook that he applies, so unsparingly, to the
relationships he portrays in <i>The Man on the Rock</i>. The
single-mindedness of the approach is impressive. By absenting himself
from the country of his own upbringing—the Britain in which
novelists were expected always yo concern themselves principally with
matters of class—and by writing about other people, from a range of
cultures, in another land, he felt able to address one of his pet
topics, the corruption of love, without compunction.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
At the heart of the
story he tells is the heartlessness of Spiro Polymerides. Once
exploited himself, Spiro has become an exploiter in his turn,
meanwhile forgetting that there might have been better ways of
behaving. If he survived a tragedy as a child, the nature of that
survival must be called into question. His lack of emotional
intelligence turns out to be the scab over a wound, after all. King
is not in the business of making excuses for his more unpleasant
characters, but he does give us the material with which to diagnose
their moral weakness. And King’s sceptical view of love’s
possibilities has the incidental effect of highlighting the futility
of political interference in personal morality. The authorities—any
authorities—can purge anyone they choose, whether because of the
gender of his sexual partners or the kind of dive he frequents; they
can impose an approved course of psychiatric rebalancing; they can
even (as so often happened in that period) apply electrodes. But in
the Francis King universe no amount of conformist interventive
treatment can reduce love to a benign condition. Moral or not, it
hurts. That is why he takes it so seriously.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-78132698540161132152016-03-29T04:09:00.000-07:002016-04-03T06:29:45.892-07:00To the Dark Tower[This is my introduction I wrote for the 2014 Valancourt Press reissue of Francis King's novel.]<br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Re-reading <i>To the
Dark Tower</i> in 1975, when Arrow reissued it in paperback (it had
first been published in 1946 when he was twenty-three), Francis King
was ‘pleasantly surprised’—as well he might be. He recorded
this reaction in his 1993 memoir <i>Yesterday Came Suddenly</i>, but
he had little else to say about the book. By then he had published a
further seventeen or so novels, as well as poetry, short stories,
reviews and a lot else; and he had pursued a career that took him
around the world. You could forgive his finding a lot more to talk
about in a book about himself; but his first novel is more than just
an item on a distinguished resume.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
Roughly drafted during
his first year as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, <i>To
the Dark Tower</i> was mainly written in the evenings, at a small
folding table in his bedroom, when, as a pacifist during the late
months of the Second World War, he was spending his days doing hard
physical work on a smallholding in Essex. By the time he went back to
Oxford, after the war, it had been published.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Here and in subsequent
novels, one of King’s main topics is the passion that simmers under
the surface of English self-restraint during an era of bowler-hatted
conformity and creeping suburbia. Late in the book, there is a scene
in which the central character Hugh Weir and his friend Croft go for
a walk in the New Forest. This great park was once created as hunting
land for William the Conqueror but is now crawling with hikers and
picnickers and has been subjected to the conventions of the suburban
crowd, there for the day in their cheap automobiles:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm; page-break-before: auto;">
Not too far: that was the great thing. Keep to the paths and picnic
where others had left their picnic paper. And in case the solitude
and the silence should suddenly become intolerable and one had to
escape, two or three hundred yards away were parked the Morrises and
the Austins and the Hillmans.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This may look like the
beginnings of a complaint about the rising lower classes, perhaps
similar in tone to the closing pages of Evelyn Waugh’s <i>Brideshead
Revisited</i> (1945). But class was not a topic that particularly
interested King. Indeed, as his career developed, he often gave his
fiction overseas settings in order to escape the unspoken imperative
of his era, that an English writer must concern himself primarily
with questions of class. His international career for the British
Council (Italy, Greece, Finland, Japan) provided some of the rich
settings for these escapes from the British prison of class.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
The New Forest
picnickers who stay close to their cars and stick to the designated
footpaths represent a small-mindedness and cool-heartedness that is
to be deplored in English life. There is a dash of Lawrence in King’s
work, perhaps more than a dash of Forster. He takes from the former
the impulse to overcome inhibition, and from the latter the need for
human connectedness. General Sir Hugh Weir’s masculine inhibitions
have made him self-consciously rigid in both body and emotion—he
does read books, but his assessments of what he reads are not made
according to aesthetic criteria: ‘I have begun to re-read <i>A
Farewell to Arms</i>. That is a virile book’—and yet he is a
restless spirit, amenable to romantic inspiration. For such a more
open-minded spirit, a dream may even take shape to the extent of
becoming a plan: a sexual encounter, say, or a trip up the Amazon.
But he needs help to make the leap, and he is inclined to resist, or
unable to recognise, the helping hand. One such, at first, is Croft;
another, Shirley Forsdike, who mistakenly thinks that Ren<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">é</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">
</span>Descartes said ‘I feel, therefore I am’.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
The suppression of
emotional intensity is an obvious topic for a gay writer from the
immediate post-war period, regardless of whether he makes gayness
explicit as his central topic. (I think of Somerset Maugham and
Terence Rattigan.) As the first novel of a gay writer during the
period of continued illegality, <i>To the Dark Tower</i> has its
points of interest, even if the theme of same-sex love or desire is
not yet central, as it would be in some of King’s later books. Hugh
Weir’s friend S.N.G., a writer, seems to be a homosexual of the old
sort. His poetry is brutal but, from Hugh’s viewpoint, his private
life seems to be conducted with discreet but not secret gentility:
‘So cautiously amorous, inviting young writers to meet his mother
or giving them dinner at his Club’. In old age he is attended by
Simpson, who began his service as gardener’s boy, then became
chauffeur, and is now nurse-maid; but he obviously means more to his
employer in an unnamed private role.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
By contrast, as a
heterosexual, Hugh is at least free to be open in his forays into
human contact. He has seen the world. Even at seventeen, he went to
Paris with S.N.G. and two other friends:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm; page-break-before: auto;">
For his school-friends, on that visit to Paris, it had been
sufficient to drink absinthe in a Montmartre caf<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">é</span>
where the sexes danced together—women mooning round in each others’
arms, men swaying together. But to him this had merely seemed
trivial: he had outgrown his adolescence.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So he buys off his
virginity in the arms of a whore. Not for him the pose of cultured
decadence that convinces his friends they are alive to the world.
(But the whore still calls him ‘<i>petit gar</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><i>ç</i></span><i>on</i>’.)
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the carnage he
witnesses among the trenches of the First World War, as he writes in
his diary, ‘it had seemed to me that here was a brotherhood to be
proud of—the brotherhood of Slayer and Slain. Those soldiers were
nearer than lovers, their hate was more noble than any love. I saw
then the need for suffering and death’. Something of the same
thrill arises again, later, when he and S.N.G. travel together to
Nazi Berlin and see ‘the virile youth goose-stepping through the
streets’. He had thought this spirit had vanished from the
civilised world, but here it is again: ‘A virile barbarism, pagan,
not effete, strong, ruthlessly strong, ascetic—I had found what I
imagined no longer existed’. He finds himself wishing for another
war even as he sees ‘S.N.G.’s eyes closing in distaste’, not
taken in by the surface glamour of the scene. Nazism is evidently
more acceptable to the homosocial sensibility of the soldier than to
the homosexual desire of the writer.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
Where Hugh is
unrestrained is in his advocacy of high standards of masculinity: he
causes the death of his own son, Dennis, in a test of the boy’s
virility and daring.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm; page-break-before: auto;">
But he loved his Father, oh yes, he loved him. And in the innocently
erotic dreams of childhood he and Father no longer wrestled, but lay
silent and motionless together, all conflict gone; and Dennis’s
face rested on his chest; and his arms encircled him in a snare of
love.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When Hugh makes friends
with the younger man Croft, he sees qualities in him that he would
have appreciated in Dennis. And yet these turn out not to be the ones
he had demanded of the boy when he was alive. Croft is good at
cooking, housework and embroidery. Hugh writes: ‘It is only the
bowler-hatted multitudes, afraid of being thought effeminate, who cry
out: “That’s not a <i>man’s</i> job”. The true, the virile,
man usurps a woman’s household function without shame’. So
masculinity can have a third dimension, after all.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
S.N.G. sees Hugh as a
god who has responsibilities to those who worship him. If nothing
else, he must live up to his own life-long refusal to join the cowed
conformists. It is, crucially, S.N.G. who pushes him to respond to
Shirley’s desperation—a response that proves, in the end, of
equal benefit to his own unrecognised needs.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
Hugh, or rather the
General (as he becomes), has been a ‘hero’ in public life, even
if he is not exactly a hero to the novel. His past has been spent
‘leading impossible expeditions, heroically showing young boys how
to die’; for which he has been rewarded with mentions and medals.
As a young man of action in public, he also achieved a good deal of
action in private, sowing his wild oats, before settling down to
married life, fatherhood and widower-hood. Yet in later life he finds
himself hero-worshipped still, by a much younger woman in whom he has
no interest and whom he therefore resists. In the end it is Shirley’s
dogged pursuit of Hugh that comes closest to equalling any heroism he
exhibited in his early life.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
Francis King went on
writing fiction to the end of his life, even while juggling the
duties and distractions of a major figure in the nation’s literary
life. He was drama critic of the <i>Sunday Telegraph</i>, chairman of
the Society of Authors, president of International PEN, a fellow of
the Royal Society of Literature... In the 1970s, he co-founded with
Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy the Writers Action Group, which was
to campaign for Public Lending Right. He was given the conventional
honours of an officially recognised literary figure: the OBE in 1979,
CBE in 1985.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
His novels often
included autobiographical themes or events. In this book, for
instance, a preoccupation with the deaths of fathers is taken from
the author’s own life: King’s father, who worked in the Indian
Intelligence Bureau, died of tuberculosis when the boy was only
thirteen. But he was never confessional, always circumspect. Despite
the themes I have been outlining, in this early fiction and even
towards the end of his career, he always seems to be holding
something back. Perhaps that is how he most clearly differs, not only
from Lawrence and Forster, but also from nearer contemporaries such
as Angus Wilson. Perhaps his gradual entry into the Establishment
accounts for this ultimate limitation on his fiction.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-86628355924553153112016-03-25T02:26:00.005-07:002016-03-26T03:22:41.145-07:00Oxford and Westminster
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Nigel Nicolson, the son
of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, went up to Balliol in
1935. In his account of the atmosphere of the place, the undiluted
masculinism of college life is shown to have been deliberately
encouraged by the dons and willingly entered into by the students:
‘We took our cue from the dons, who discouraged heterosexual love
as irrelevant to our purpose in being there, and treated girls as
blue-stockings who could not be expected to understand our male
society’. Of course, to discourage heterosexuality is not quite the
same as to encourage homosexuality; but at Oxford they often seemed
part of the same process. Only a few innocents were shocked, for
whatever reason, by the long-established celebrations of maleness
that university life involved. One was the future prime minister,
Edward Heath, a friend of Nicolson’s: ‘Once we went for a walk
along the banks of the Cherwell and came to the spot, known as
Parson’s Pleasure, where undergraduates had for centuries bathed in
the nude. Ted had never heard of it and was shocked. “Why,” he
said, “anyone might come along. <i>Girls</i> might come along,”
and nothing would reassure him’.<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></sup>
Heath was a grammar school boy. His reaction to Parson’s Pleasure
– by Oxford standards apparently so prim – is to a large extent a
matter of background and class. The attempts that Nicolson made to
‘reassure him’ are not specified (Girls don’t come this way?
Girls don’t shock? Girls don’t matter?), but what is clear is
that the very fact that Heath, whatever his own sexual orientation,
introduced ‘girls’ into the equation, is what stigmatises him as
an outsider. By Oxford rules – unwritten but cemented by extensive
precedent, like the British constitution itself – certain
pleasures, whether innocent or not, are inviolate. Their continuance
is understood. The presence of shockable girls would say less about
the source of the shock than about the facile shockability of girls.
The pleasure of the parson, whether derived from merely watching or
actually taking part, is paramount.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Another future prime
minister, Harold Wilson, seems to have been similarly bypassed by the
supposedly prevailing ethos of 1930s Oxford. Wilson was at Jesus
College, considerably smaller and poorer than the likes of Christ
Church and Balliol. A friend and contemporary later said to Wilson’s
biographer: ‘We were very naïve and innocent. … For example, I
don’t think I had ever heard of homosexuals when I was an
undergraduate, and Harold may not have either. I had no idea that
spies were recruited at Oxford’.<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote2sym" name="sdfootnote2anc"><sup>2</sup></a></sup>
Not that this should come as a surprise: espionage was, after all, a
<i>secret</i> service; and homosexuality was still, for the most
part, a love that dared not speak its name. Although Wilson would
later preside over a mildly reformist Labour government, he absented
himself from the vote on the Second Reading of the Sexual Offences
Bill (6 February 1966), so as not to have to vote either way on the
partial decriminalisation of male homosexual acts. At the time of
the 1974 general election, <i>Gay News</i> judged that, of the three
leaders of the main political parties – Labour’s Wilson, the
Tories’ Edward Heath and the Liberals’ Jeremy Thorpe (of whom,
more later) – Wilson was the least sympathetic to the question of
gay rights.<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote3sym" name="sdfootnote3anc"><sup>3</sup></a></sup>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Richard Crossman, who
would be Harold Wilson’s Minister for Housing and Local Government,
and later his Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, was
better informed and better placed, as an undergraduate, not only to
notice but also to take up the gay social and sexual opportunities
the university offered him. Not only did he enjoy himself
homosexually at that age—in his diary entry for 23 May 1929 he
described a feverish Easter holiday in Cornwall with a young poet:
‘He kept me in a little white-washed room for a fortnight because
his mouth was against mine and we were completely together’—but
in later life when prominent in public life he openly acknowledged
that aspect of his past. As his biographer puts it, ‘Dick never
sought to conceal the fact that in his early years at Oxford he had
operated predominantly as a homosexual. Given the circle, dominated
by W.H. Auden, which he had chosen to infiltrate, it was hardly
likely that it would be otherwise’. At Christ Church he competed
with Auden for the affections of the heterosexual Gabriel Carritt.<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote4sym" name="sdfootnote4anc"><sup>4</sup></a></sup>
Auden did have a sexual relationship with Crossman, but on one
occasion at least, Stephen Spender failed to seduce Crossman. Just
as Spender was making his move, Crossman uttered the immortal lines:
‘You know, Stephen, since I met you my life’s entirely
altered. When I first knew you I used to masturbate and I used
to read pornographic books. But now, after being with you, all
that’s stopped. I don’t masturbate and I’m absolutely
pure!’ This successfully dampened Spender’s ardour.<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote5sym" name="sdfootnote5anc"><sup>5</sup></a></sup>
However, a further attempt must have been successful: for when
Crossman died in February 1975, Spender recorded in his journal
memories of ‘a reading party at Crackington Manor when I had a
slight “affair” with Dick which was compounded of passion and
lust on both sides, and was not in the least serious’.<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote6sym" name="sdfootnote6anc"><sup>6</sup></a></sup>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<div class="sdfootnote-western">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>
Nigel Nicolson, <i>Long Life</i> (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1997), p.66.</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote2">
<div class="sdfootnote-western">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote2anc" name="sdfootnote2sym">2</a>
Ben Pimlott, <i>Harold Wilson</i> (London: Harper Collins, 1992),
p47.</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote3">
<div class="sdfootnote-western">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote3anc" name="sdfootnote3sym">3</a>
Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter, <i>Peers, Queers and Commons: The Struggle
for Gay Law Reform from 1950 to the Present</i> (London: Routledge,
1991), pp 74, 111.</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote4">
<div class="sdfootnote-western">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote4anc" name="sdfootnote4sym">4</a>
Anthony Howard, <i>Crossman: The Pursuit of Power</i> (London: Cape,
1990), p.24.</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote5">
<div class="sdfootnote-western">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote5anc" name="sdfootnote5sym">5</a>
John Sutherland, <i>Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography</i>
(London: Viking, 2004), p.100.</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote6">
<div class="sdfootnote-western">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=361881194005082935#sdfootnote6anc" name="sdfootnote6sym">6</a>
Stephen Spender, <i>Journals 1939-1983</i> (London: Faber, 1992),
p.294.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-44981425253511652472016-03-24T08:24:00.001-07:002016-03-26T09:23:19.565-07:00Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World<br />
<br />
<br />
Forthcoming from Yale University Press, April (UK) and May (USA) 2016:<br />
<br />
Gregory Woods<br />
<b><i>Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World</i></b><br />
<br />
Details: <a href="http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300218039">http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300218039</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-16254796913402062492016-03-24T08:17:00.002-07:002016-03-24T08:52:42.311-07:00The Myth of the Last Taboo<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">New publication from Trent Editions:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Gregory Woods</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><b><i>The Myth of the Last Taboo: Queer Subcultural Studies</i></b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Seismic
changes took place in Western societies’ attitudes to homosexuality
around the turn of the 20</span><sup><span style="font-weight: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and 21</span><sup><span style="font-weight: normal;">st</span></sup><span style="font-weight: normal;">
centuries. At first, gay communities suffered from rabidly hostile
responses to the AIDS epidemic. Those terrible years were followed by
piecemeal legal reform and a gradual thaw in the way gayness was
represented in popular culture. </span>From the ‘wages of sin’ to
the commercialisation of desire, from pretend families to equal
marriage, gay people were eventually sucked into the mainstream of
contemporary life. But how irreversible are those changes, how secure
the future they promise?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Best known for his
literary criticism, Gregory Woods now turns his attention to
journalism, film, TV, shopping, popular fiction, cartoons, the
memoirs of the Beirut hostages, desert island stories, travel
brochures, Italian camp, and anything else that takes his fancy. By
paying close attention to the detail, he manages to convey the
broader picture of a major turning-point in Western attitudes to
sexuality. These essays amply demonstrate how gay and lesbian
studies, far from addressing only narrow concerns, open up fresh
perspectives on some of the more intractable issues of our times.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
CONTENTS</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Those marked (*) are
published here for the first time.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">1. Mourning becomes a lecture [Grieving
as media stereotype and a queer cultural festival.] </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">(*)</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-before: auto; text-indent: -0.03cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">2. We’re here, we’re queer, and
we’re not going catalogue-shopping [Shopping catalogues and the
commercialisation of sexual identity.]</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">3. Are we not men? [Desert island
narratives in fiction and film.]</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">4. Holidays of a lifestyle [Gay and
lesbian holiday brochures.]</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">5.
The end of Arcadia [The beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in the French
gay press.]</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">6.
Something for everyone [Lesbian and gay magazine programmes on UK
television in the 1980s and 1990s.]</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">7.
An epidemic atmosphere [The AIDS epidemic as atmospheric effect in US
crime fiction, 1981-2001.]</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">8.
It’s my nature [Moral re-branding and the de-sexing of gay men in
1990s AIDS films.]</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">9. Is he musical? [How movies use music
to connote a standardised version of the gay man.]</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">10. In search of Italian camp </span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">11. The Orient in a cell [Male love and
homosexual panic in the Beirut hostage memoirs.] (*)</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-indent: -0.64cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">12.
The myth of the last taboo [The journalistic clich<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">é</span>
as an indicator of liberal optimism and conservative regrouping.] (*)</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Available from the Trent Editions online store: <a href="http://onlinestore.ntu.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=15">http://onlinestore.ntu.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=15</a></b><br />
<b> </b>
</div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-44979677408983427142014-05-27T05:18:00.003-07:002014-05-27T05:20:30.092-07:00Look Down in Mercy<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For a first novel, <i>Look
Down in Mercy</i> is an extraordinary achievement. Like many
fictional accounts of the Second World War, it is based on first-hand
experience. Walter Baxter had taken part in the 1942 campaign against
the Japanese in Burma, and had joined the subsequent retreat into
India. The novel's version of these events is rendered
psychologically plausible with a wealth of detail about physical and
mental endurance, in a hostile climate, on the face of an unforgiving
landscape, and at the mercy of an efficient and ruthless enemy. As a
hardcore novel of warfare, it is persuasive and compelling.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But there is more to
it than that. This is more than a pulp-fiction account of heroism and
derring-do. Despite its depressing moments of racism about both the
Japanese enemy and the Indian allies—moments which, like the book's
similar evidence of routine sexism, are quite unremarkable for their
era—the novel is no mere celebration of British strategic or moral
superiority. Yes, it includes accounts of Japanese war crimes; but
its British central character, Tony Kent, is all the more
interesting for the fact that, in his personal relationships no less
than his professional behaviour as a soldier, he is morally
compromised throughout.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A further degree of
complexity is added to an already sophisticated book by what we might
call its 'gay theme', the intimate relationship that develops between
Kent and his batman, Anson. So anguished is this relationship, on
Kent's part at least (for Anson seems to accept it in good heart,
with a docile equanimity that is often very moving), that it is
perfectly in keeping with the context of the war. Like the retreat
into India, on foot and in the extremes of illness and thirst, the
love affair is no sentimental romance, but an epic of resistance and
endurance. Even if the protagonists survive, it is hard to see how
their love will.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Kent's attitudes to
homosexuality are unquestioningly negative. Most of his moments of
intimacy with Anson are compromised by guilt feelings and followed by
attacks of self-loathing or, at best, of regret. Even at the decisive
moment of their first embrace, while the narrative suggests the
abandonment of scruples ('without considering the consequences'),
nevertheless we are told that Kent puts his arms around Anson
'believing that what he was about to do was utterly disgraceful and
criminal'. (Not until 1957 would the Wolfenden Report recommend the
partial decriminalisation of male homosexual acts, and not until 1967
would those recommendations be enacted, if only in England and Wales;
but this liberalisation would not apply to the armed services.) So
deeply ingrained is Kent's disapproval that, even when disregarding
the specific consequences of this particular embrace, at this exact
moment, at this precise map reference, he cannot help being flooded
with an awareness of the possibility of social scandal: informally,
in any social milieu he knows, this sexual act must be judged
'disgraceful'; and formally, should it ever reach the courts, martial
or otherwise, it must inevitably be judged 'criminal'. So much for
the pleasure of the two men's first embrace.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the morning, Kent
feels 'misery and regret' over what they have done, even if 'he could
almost feel love' for the man he is lying next to. In the hours that
follow, he deliberately takes on a risky leadership role that he
might normally have delegated to one of his non-commissioned
officers, in part because 'he wanted to prove something to himself
and to Anson, but what it was he did not know'. To have become the
lover of another man—if only perhaps once, only perhaps in a moment
of weakness, only perhaps for lack of the presence of women—is to
run the risk of obliterating one's masculine identity, albeit while
still wearing the uniform and insignia of membership of the armed
services. To have spent a night in another man's arms is to call into
doubt one's manly capabilities. Hence the test and the proof. In the
hot light of day, 'something' needs proving, to the satisfaction of
both parties. At this stage, it seems, Kent wants to prove that last
night was an aberration and that he is still a real man.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Kent has read the
British newspapers and he has seen, or heard of, the visible presence
of homosexual men in Britain. In no respect does he identify with
them, either as individuals or as a cause:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.22cm; orphans: 0; widows: 0;">
As for being a pervert (the word conjured up, for him, repelling
images of furtive old men peering over the tops of public urinals,
clergymen volunteering to undergo 'treatment' for six months to avoid
prison, and effeminate shop-assistants talking like a music-hall
comedian), last night was the first time that anything of that nature
had happened to him.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He persuades himself
that nothing of the sort would have happened if he had not been 'away
from Celia for so long' (she being his wife); and that no such thing
will happen again because he intends to track down 'that nice nurse'
Helen Dean, with whom he spent a drunken night on the ship that was
taking them to Rangoon. In other words, regardless of his fondness
for Anson, he knows he does not belong to any of the limited range of
homosexual types he is aware of—never having actively sought sexual
contact with another man, never having been deemed a suitable case
for either treatment or punishment, and not being effeminate (even if
this needs proving to himself and Anson)—and he knows that, as soon
as suitable circumstances can be arranged, his heterosexuality will
prevail.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
That is one step
towards reassurance on the morning after. More difficult to achieve,
because demanding a lack of witnesses, Anson's discretion, and
continued vigilance, is that nobody else should ever become aware of
the two men's relationship. After they first spend a night together
in the security and comfort of a private bedroom and bed, Kent is
again both ashamed and calculating: 'He had committed the
unforgivable sin, and now there was nothing to be done except not to
be found out'.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As we have seen, on
the morning after their first encounter, Kent reassures himself that
'last night was the first time that anything of that nature had
happened to him'. But, as it turns out, he has either forgotten his
own schooldays or discounted them. There is a conversation between
him and Anson, much later in the book, in which Kent explicitly
claims never to have done 'anything like this' in his life. Anson,
who presumably has, suggests that he must at least have 'known
something about it … when you were a kid at school. Kent replies:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.24cm; orphans: 0; widows: 0;">
Yes, but that was different, utterly different. You must know what
little beasts boys are. It was just dirty-mindedness, it didn't mean
anything. Once, maybe twice, fooling around in the lavatories.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He adds, 'It wasn't
anything like this.' This lack of meaning, as attributed to sexual
encounters between schoolboys, clearly refers to the 'passing phase'
theory of adolescent homosexuality, so useful to excuse the past
indiscretions of men who had been through the English public (i.e.
private) school system. Youthful experimentation, lack of female
company, the hothouse atmosphere of a closed institution—these
allowed for both romantic attachments and (as long as no one caught
the miscreants) frictional release. But his and Anson's relationship
is, as Kent says, 'utterly different'. It is, of course, more
dangerous—running the risk of court martial and imprisonment or
'treatment'—and, as he has finally begun to realise, more
meaningful. What he does with Anson is no mere 'dirty-mindedness'.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When the odious
Goodwin arrives, 'venomous and sneering', to attempt to blackmail
Kent, all of the latter's fears about the consequences of his
'criminal carelessness' prove justified. (The novel's opening
chapter, in which Anson and Goodwin take a shower next to each other,
proves to have been a mischievous diversionary tactic on the part of
the author.) Imprisonment apart, blackmail was the main risk
homosexual men faced during the era of criminality. It could be the
outcome of any homosexual encounter with a stranger; and it could
result from the negligence allowing a third party to witness a
compromising encounter. Fear of blackmail kept many men celibate.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Walter Baxter exploits
such fears for most of the novel, using Goodwin to embody the threat.
The fact that we know he is a murderer eliminates any moral ambiguity
about his repulsive personality. It is always going to be hard even
for the homophobic reader to sympathise with him when he calls Kent
'nothing but a bloody nancy boy' and a 'gutless nancy', since he is
such a manifestly nasty piece of work. Indeed, even the homosexual
reader might understand how Kent, when faced with Goodwin's threats
and insults, reflects that 'he would rather be suspected of murder
than homosexuality' and picks up his revolver...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Goodwin is all bad,
Anson all good. Both are rather two dimensional characters. But, as I
have already suggested, the real power of this novel comes from
Baxter's willingness to develop a central character who is morally
ambiguous even to the extent of being thoroughly compromised. Kent is
both a hero and a coward, a saver of lives and a killer, a homophobe
and the lover of a man. He treats Anson as if he were disposable—and
we can be sure that he would sacrifice Anson if his own safety were
at stake. Anson knows this. And yet, in spite of all the negative
aspects of his personality, Baxter still manages to use Kent as a
positive representative of homosexuality: masculine, patriotic,
mature and capable (in all these respects matching the less visible
but steadier Anson).</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Similarly ambivalent
are both of the book's two endings, that of 1951 for the British
market, and that of 1952 for the American (printed here as an
appendix). One is unhappy and the other happy, but neither is
definitive. I shall not go into detail about this, but Baxter clearly
wanted to leave open the possibilities in each, not least in their
moral implications. Compared with the heavy-handed alternative
endings of Gore Vidal's <i>The City and the Pillar</i> (1948 and
1965), one involving murder and the other rape, these are—even if
dramatic—subtle and suggestive in ways that, in both cases,
appropriately round off a novel that consistently avoids resorting to
the obvious.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Walter Baxter's second
novel, <i>The Image and the Search</i> (1953), about a widow who
takes several lovers in a quest to replace the image of her late
husband, turned out to be far more controversial than <i>Look Down in
Mercy</i>. In March 1954, Lord Beaverbrook used the pages of the
<i>Daily Express</i> to put pressure on the publishers, Heinemann, to
withdraw it. They did so, and also withheld it from Putnam's in the
USA. In October of that year, publisher and author were charged under
the Obscene Publications Act. They had to endure two trials before
finally being acquitted. Anticipating by some sixteen years the
absurdities of the trial of <i>Lady Chatterley's Lover</i>, one of
the prosecutors asked, 'Would anyone give this book as a present to
his daughter or his typist?'</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Like E.M. Forster
before him, Baxter found the pressure not to write about the topics
that interested him too much to bear, and he gave up writing.
Instead, he eventually became a successful restaurateur. His greatest
success was in running, jointly with his lover Fergus Provan, the
Chanterelle in South Kensington. If at some point he makes an
appearance in Christopher Isherwood's diaries as a self-pitying
drunk, we can offer him the courtesy of our indulgence. After all,
this was a man who had written two daring and accomplished novels,
both of which raised the topic of homosexuality at a time when for a
homosexual novelist to do so took some nerve. And, having been
daring, he had been ordered not to dare.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
[This essay was first published as the introduction to Walter Baxter, <i>Look Down in Mercy</i> (Richmond, Virginia: Valancourt Books, 2014), pp.v-x).]</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-3993062037423091022014-03-04T09:25:00.000-08:002014-03-04T09:25:08.378-08:00Brodsky in Exile
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[Review of </span></span></span><i><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Brodsky
Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia</span></span></span></i><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">,
by Sanna Turoma (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). This piece first appeared in <i>Studies in Travel Writing</i>.]</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For
some, exile is imprisonment, for others a liberation. The Russian
poet Joseph Brodsky had both experiences, having been in the first
instance sent into restrictive internal exile, with hard labour, and
in the second released from the USSR altogether and thereby rendered
free to travel the world. After the question of whether leaving the
homeland was chosen (James Joyce) or forced (Ovid, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn), the principal factor in how a writer copes with exile
is language. There are degrees of exile, and one of the determining
factors—as anyone who has lived in a ‘foreign’ culture knows—is
whether you can easily have a conversation with the native speaker:
exile to a place which speaks your own language is much less of a
displacement than to be lost in the babble of an alien tongue. Exiled
writers may stick to their own language as a means of clinging to
their own culture and customs (Solzhenitsyn) and go on writing in it
and developing it beyond the confines of everyday use (Joyce), or
they could develop a fluency in the language of their place of exile
and start writing in it as well as in their own (Samuel Beckett).</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Once
Joseph Brodsky had turned himself into what some reviewers were able
to refer to as an American poet—by translating his Russian work
into English and beginning to write directly in what can, at best, be
called an idiosyncratic version of English—he effectively
neutralised his expulsion from his homeland. Yet isn’t being a poet
itself a kind of exile? When Rimbaud said </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Je
est un autre</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">,
he was referring to his poetic persona. When we write or read out our
poetry, as distinct from our prose (even prose fiction), we are
ventriloquizing an alien voice, even if it is enacting a version of
ourselves. That is why it is quite wrong to think of poetry as the
most personal of the literary modes. Even when at his most
reflective, Brodsky looked outward, as if from a peak in Darien.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In
1964 he was sent into internal exile in the Archangelsk region,
sentenced to forced labour for his ‘social parasitism’. While
there, he spent his evenings reading English and American poetry from
an anthology he had taken with him. The sentence was commuted in
1965, but the parasitism continued to irritate the authorities until
1972, when he was expelled from the USSR. Put on a plane, he was
completely unaware of where he was being sent. Only after landing in
Vienna did he find out. One logical eventual destination might have
been Israel; but the logic of his cultural interests—and the past
trajectory of his master, W.H. Auden—led him to the United States,
where he lived for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. He
died in New York in 1996, aged only 55, but was buried in Venice.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There
is a restlessness in Brodsky’s work that has something to do with
the ambition to make major works. Even in his celebrated ‘Elegy for
John Donne’ of 1963, which begins in the stillness of the inanimate
objects around the poet’s death bed, Brodsky cannot resist drawing
his focus back to take in the whole house, then the snow-filled
streets around it, then the whole cityscape of London, then the
island itself—all shrouded in silence—and, beyond it, the
immensity of Donne’s importance and the consequentiality of his
loss: ‘there are no more sounds in all the world’. By thus
claiming universal significance on Donne’s behalf—especially when
one considers that Brodsky had read virtually no Donne at the time of
writing, apart from ‘No man is an island’, which he thought was
from a poem—Brodsky incidentally does the same for his own
reputation. A good deal of ambitious purpose is on show in the
geographical mobility of his work, easily contrasted with the
trivial, touristic postcard-poems that have become such a common
feature of recent verse.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
date of his forced emigration from the USSR looms large, as a
psychological border-crossing, in all the narratives of Brodsky’s
life except his own: for he always played down the extent of the
change, referring to the move to the USA as a spatial continuity. Yet
in order to make this case, he had to downplay the clear fact that he
had yearned for escape from the country of his birth to an extreme
extent. This is evidenced by the fact that he and a friend planned to
hijack a plane out of there, and they even bought tickets for the
flight before Brodsky got moral cold feet.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sanna
Turoma says Brodsky was ‘not a </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>travel
writer</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">,
but he was a </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>traveling
writer</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">’
(p.6). He did not set out accurately to record what he saw on his
journeys for the sake of readers who did not know the places or
peoples he was visiting. Instead, he allowed travel to set off
whatever reflections occurred to him. No objective observer, he used
the world he observed to make him think.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
And he was, of course, a poet. There is an argument—and it is worth
according at least some respectful attention—that a poem can never
be about a ‘real’ place. The transformative properties of
verse—or, at least, those of verse that is intensively wrought and
therefore manifestly not designed to do the job of prose—may leave
behind the reporting function, the mimesis, of prosaic realism.
Whereas the conventional travel writer may be attempting a reliable
record of journeys taken, the poet will use those journeys as mere
starting points.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There
was a lot of intra-Soviet travel in Brodsky’s early verse, much of
his reporting of it influenced by his reading of Ernest Hemingway,
John Dos Passos and T.S. Eliot. Clearly, within his own mind, he was
already lighting out for the territories and going West. It seems he
already wanted to be an American writer. Valentina Polukhina has
pointed out that ‘the image of a man in exile’ appeared in his
verse ‘long before his exile’ (p.38). Displacement preoccupied him
from the start. This is, in part, a matter of Modernist association
with the solitary (male) individual who is never at home; partly a
sense of himself as a Jew, ever the outsider, nomadic in intelligence
even when not so in person.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In
line with Modernist tradition he regarded exile as ‘a metaphysical
condition’ (p.21), not a political one. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he was
happy to have escaped the USSR and thereby gave himself the luxury of
ostentatiously ignoring the situation there. For Ovid, exile was a
terrible cultural deprivation. Solzhenitsyn was like a baby torn from
his mother’s breast. But, as I have said, for Brodsky enforced
exile opened up a wealth of voluntary opportunities. As Turoma puts
it: ‘The freedom to travel and to exploit non-native territories
for literary purposes was granted to Brodsky by the coercion of
exile, and it is the experience of exile and tourism—two major
forms of displacement, often perceived as conflicting human
conditions—that creates the crux of much of Brodsky’s post-1972
writing’ (p.10).</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Although
he lived in New York City for many years, he wrote hardly anything
about it. Yet he was very much an urban writer, in both his verse and
his prose. Turoma concentrates a large part of her study on Brodsky’s
essays on Istanbul (‘Flight from Byzantium,’ 1985) and Venice
(</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Watermark</i></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">,
1992), triangulating his exilic consciousness between those cities
and his birthplace, Leningrad, rather than with anywhere in the
United States. Each of the three cities is a liminal site, perched on
the edge of a culture and looking away from it while yet deriving
power from its very marginality.</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Comparisons
can be made between the re-namings (St. Petersburg, Petrograd,
Leningrad, St. Petersburg; Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul), the
topographical situation in such close contact with water and
waterways (the Neva and the Gulf of Finland; the Bosporus and the
Golden Horn; the Grand Canal, the lagoon and the Adriatic). They are
cities in which the permanence of art is set up as if in defiance of
the manifest impermanence of water; and yet, as any artist or
architect who sought to create permanence out of such a location was
aware, the restlessness of the seascape would ultimately prevail.
Brodsky certainly knew this, acutely aware of the ephemerality of his
assaults on eternity.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">From
a Western viewpoint, the USSR was eastern even at its westernmost and
most Western point, Leningrad; yet to a native of that city,
Leningrad was more Western, more European, more modern, than Moscow.
Brodsky’s version of the USSR was a challenge to Edward Said’s
Occident/Orient dichotomy, or complicated it at least. He was a fully
signed-up Westerniser, by contrast with Slavophiles like
Solzhenitsyn. When he wrote about Istanbul he seemed wholeheartedly
to subscribe to Orientalist mythologies of the sort identified by
Said. Although he knew the whole of the USSR was oriental to western
Europeans, with whom he identified culturally, he still saw Turkey as
more oriental than the distant outposts of Soviet-influenced
Mongolia. </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For
all that he was an exiled dissident, he subscribed to the values of
‘Leningradian Eurocentrism’ (p.143) when responding to voices in
the east of the USSR asserting their cultural validity. </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Turoma
attributes this awkward position to ‘a nostalgic attitude towards
Russia’s and Europe’s common cultural heritage of imperial myths’
(p.228).</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Turoma
is good at associating Brodsky’s Venice within a context of Russian
literary representations going back to Pushkin, as well as English
ones going back to Shakespeare—and in her reading of Brodsky she
rightly associates Pushkin’s ethnic marginality with Othello’s.
But, although he anchored his work in European traditions, in the end
he felt more at home in the history-light archipelago of American
universities. It is no coincidence that one can sometimes hear, in
his work in English, something of the tone of Vladimir Nabokov. Even
so, Brodsky never stopped seeing the world in European terms. Indeed,
in effect, Europe </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>was</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
his world because it had Europe’s cultural history. The New World
was just that—</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>new</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">—so
in Rio de Janeiro he dismissed his host city, and by implication all
of Brazil, as being without history. He was loftily dismissive of the
post-colonial leftism he encountered in Mexico. He seems not to have
had the same problem, or not to have had it to the same extent, with
the places he visited or lived in in the USA. Above all, he regarded
movement and displacement as a condition of human existence. I am
reminded of Zbigniew Herbert’s notion of ‘a true journey’
being one ‘from which you do not return’—the universal instance
being the journey of life itself.</span></span></span><br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-87364590783047584372014-02-23T08:41:00.000-08:002014-02-23T08:41:35.484-08:00John Barton, HYMN
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>A review of John Barton, <i>HYMN</i> (London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2009) </b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I have always been
interested in the fact that the very people who issue gay works of
art, having done so, then hold back from properly marketing them as
such. This commercial ploy, or lack of one, is most conspicuous, I
think, in the rear-cover blurbs of DVDs, which very rarely mention
the gayness of films’ themes, plots or characters. It is as if,
having funded the production of the gay work, publishing houses and
production and distribution companies then want to recoup their
losses by conning a wider audience into believing what they are about
to buy is as wholesomely straight as Sarah Palin.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I have observed the
same tendency even in the blurbs of poetry collections, which, these
days, are hardly likely to turn the heads of a mass market, no matter
what is written on the back, or even the front, of the books. In the
case of the present collection by the distinguished Canadian poet
John Barton, the publisher’s website speaks of it as a ‘journey
in search of love through the contemporary homoerotic male body’,
adding that ‘<i>Hymn</i> stokes the fires of homoerotic romantic
love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude’. Now,
‘homoerotic’ is, surely, not such a very controversial word, but
it does not appear on the book itself—not even a book that, like
this, has a picture of two, or perhaps three, men (almost) embracing
on its front cover.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
The
pithiest thing about the book is the pun in its title, suggesting a
hymn to him (whom?). The word also always brings ‘hymen’ to my
mind—but perhaps, in this case, that is one distraction too far. In
an interview on his publisher’s website, Barton says, ‘<i>Hymn</i>
puts words to the music of disappointment and aspiration that gay men
often feel in the pursuit of—and during the detours they take,
consciously and unconsciously, on the way to and away from—love.’
This parenthesis, this detour on detours, is typical of Barton’s
work at its best and worst—the individual reader can make this
qualitative choice. There are times when it is the length and
convolution of his sentences that absorbs one’s attention, rather
than the argument itself.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
Of
course, when I suggest of a poet that he uses too many words, I feel
like Joseph II: ‘Too many notes, my dear Mozart!’ And Barton is
indeed prolix—but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The
Canadians, too, have learned from the greatest bard of their southern
neighbours, Walt Whitman, how to encompass an enormous land mass in
verse that is both expansive and yet also, somehow, to the point. But
the main technical dialectic with which Barton engages is Ezra
Pound's. There is some purpose for any modern, Anglophone poet in
countering the rules of Imagism as laid down before the First World
War by Pound, or at least in straying from them when the mood
strikes. There is no absolute reason why poetry should state things
more briefly than prose would. Why should it not luxuriate in the
flow of language for its own sake? Barton clearly knows that, as well
as the Chinese and Japanese miniaturists, Pound also admired the
profuse verbosity of Chaucer and Browning.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
In
a poem addressed to ‘Drella’ (Andy Warhol), Barton refers to his
characteristic grammatical unit as ‘this kleptomaniac run-on
sentence’, suggesting that the point of the thing, like that of
Whitman’s lists, is accumulation rather than the ravelling of a
complex argument. I am all for complex sentences—there are not
enough of them in modern poetry. (A plague of parataxis in Britain
has left most of our lyric poets incapable of stringing together a
two-clause sentence without fucking up its grammar.) But I do not
consistently feel the same confidence in Barton’s control of
syntax, when he is digressing, that I do feel when going along with
the grammatical arabesques of Marcel Proust or Henry James, when
circumlocution and prolixity seem so tightly harnessed to the
complexity of the thing being said and the meticulousness of the
thought process. Those two great masters of digression never ramble.
They never lose their concentration; and as a result, when reading
them, neither do I.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
Contrary
to the publisher’s website, it is really only in the fourth of the
book’s five sections that Barton explicitly dwells on many aspects
of contemporary gay life and the ancient variants it seems to echo.
His long poem ‘Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy’, about and addressed
to Constantine Cavafy, speaks of the great Greek poet’s
relationship with the classical world as a kind of mutual or
reciprocal invagination: ‘the whole of an ancient world inside you
/ and you inside it’. Here, for the second time in the book, the
lines are so long that the poem is printed at ninety degrees to the
convention, so that one has to hold the book sideways, one page above
the other. This cleverly discomfiting ploy subverts one's confidence
and makes the very act of reading seem strange--'queer', if you must.
Usually, one only holds a book this way up to look at certain kinds
of illustration.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poem is broad in
its sweep as well as its line. Violating one of the sacred principles
of Foucaultian queer theory, it claims connections between the sexual
lives of men in different places and different times: ‘men who
travel lives not too indifferent / to our own, travelling from Sparta
to Thermopylae, from Sussex Drive to Albion Road’—the latter
being streets in Ottawa. At first, ‘indifferent’ looks like a
malapropism for ‘similar’; but one soon understands that each
generation of man-loving men takes an interest in others both past
and future, with an associative desire that is wishful and wistful,
all the more powerful for the distances it manages to span.</div>
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By
the end of the poem, it is clear that Barton is looking back to
ancient Greeks, not merely from Cavafy’s modernity, nor even from
his own post-modernity, but from some imagined future point, from
which even our most cherished technological and verbal innovations
(an earlier poem has invoked Cavafy in the abbreviations of
text-speak) will seem primitive. When he addresses ‘men of the
future looking backwards’ he inevitably echoes our position in
relation to Cavafy, or Cavafy’s to Plato, and takes bodily
possession of the words such men once addressed, and continue
addressing, to posterity.</div>
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Barton’s versions of
gayness are full of paradoxes, not merely mimicking (as so much
modern camp does badly) the wit of Oscar Wilde, but purposely
convulsing our chronologies and complacencies by questioning what we
take for granted as their logic. The poem ‘Fucking the Minotaur’
threads its way through the labyrinth of a gay bathhouse and the less
convoluted maze of the metro journey home, interestingly concluding
that the latter is by far the more erotic space. In another poem,
Barton’s take on ‘Amnesia’, that condition so perfectly
confuted in its own etymology, has gay men going about their business
among the heritage sites of modern Athens, not only making (in
Browning’s evocative phrase) ‘love among the ruins’ but
reviving what entropy had once undone. It is as if the poet were to
counter the pessimism of Eliot’s claim, ‘these fragments I have
shored against my ruins’, not much less than a century later, with
his own, these ruins I have shored against my fragments.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-61943335214808693292014-01-29T04:36:00.000-08:002014-01-29T04:36:08.413-08:00A Room in Chelsea Square<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
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<i>A Room in Chelsea Square</i> was first published anonymously in 1958. Its author was a charming but rather ineffectual young man called Michael Nelson (1921-1990). It is a book that excites very different responses. To some, it is a camp tour de force, full of wit and whimsy, a waspishly self-deprecating view of a certain type of homosexual circle from within its soulless heart or heartless soul. Some people find it very funny.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To others, especially in the decade or so after first publication, it is a parade of negative representations of homosexual men, following many of the imposed, homophobic stereotypes of the age and ending with an obligatory, if somewhat peripheral, death. Falling into the hands of the isolated gay teenager, it was not likely to raise the spirits; it could not foster pride or solidarity. This is not a novel about what was then called the 'homosexual problem'. Nor is it about what so many publishers' blurbs used to refer to as 'the twilight world of the homosexual'. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It contains no social defence of same-sex love. In that regard, it is not what one would happily call a 'gay novel' at all. It has not a single attractive and sympathetic character with whom the gay reader can identify. There is no plea for tolerance, let alone acceptance. If any of these characters are meant to be representative, the book can add nothing to an argument in favour of law reform. Although they seem never to be having sex with each other (that has to be assumed between the lines, where plausible), these are far from being the discreet, well-behaved, consenting-adults-in-private envisaged by the Wolfenden Report (which, in 1957, recommended reform of the laws on homosexual acts in England and Wales). They socialise in public places and behave with ostentatious <i>sang froid</i>. If hidden at all, they are, like Poe's purloined letter, hidden in plain sight.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And yet, one might argue, it is the very lack of an affirmative or apologetic theme that is so impressive about it. Its main virtue is that it takes homosexuality completely for granted. There is anguish aplenty, but not about being gay. Most is about being unloved or unmoneyed. Perhaps that is the point: there are more important things to worry about—a poorly cooked meal, an ill-chosen tie—than the trivial matter of being queer.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Other than by reading the publisher's blurb, how does the reader first learn that the book's central characters are gay? The narrator never says this of them. We do hear that Patrick was sent down from his Oxford college for calling the Warden 'an old-fashioned suppressed quean'; but not until later in the book—and then only by inference—shall we realise that this is also a pretty accurate description of Patrick himself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Only two words are ever used, throughout the book, to denote a homosexual man; and each is used only once. In the case just mentioned, Patrick uses 'quean' to insult an older man; and, much later, the newspaper editor Stuart Andrews refers to Ronnie Gras, mistakenly, as a 'pansy'. Never are any of the central homosexual characters explicitly referred to as such, either pejoratively or otherwise. Indeed, in the whole book, there is not a single explicitly positive reference to homosexuality at all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One other pejorative term does come up, if only by the implication of its opposite. When Patrick suspects Nicholas of having brought a woman back to the flat in his absence, he contemptuously refers to him, and to others of his ilk, as 'you <i>normals</i>'. He is wrong about this: for, as far as we can tell, Nicholas is as much of an <i>abnormal</i> as Patrick himself. This crude terminology is ultimately derived from a discourse that was especially powerful in the 1940s and 1950s, that of the mental health industry. It was an era when the skills of parenting were policed with constant references to the 'normal' and the 'abnormal' child. Despite his sense of his own superiority to popular culture, Patrick has internalised this discourse and is apparently happy to spit it out at one he supposedly loves.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The date of publication (1958) places the book just after the Wolfenden Report (1957), recommended law reform (not to be achieved until a decade later). But this is misleading, since Nelson actually wrote it in the late 1940s. The early version was called <i>A Room in Russell Square</i> and its relationships were heterosexual (Patrick was an unlikely Patricia). One can see why it failed to find a publisher, lacking the unique selling point of its homosexual theme. The delay in publication also helps to explain why its few cultural references seem a bit out of date: W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, both of whom the character Christopher quotes, are more closely associated with the 1930s (at the end of which decade, Auden famously emigrated to the USA). A Rodin sculpture and a Picasso etching are mentioned—hardly the cutting edge of new art in contemporary London. This adds to a general impression that, notwithstanding their pretensions to cultural significance, these men are all marginal to London's real literary and artistic scenes. They are just a little bit out of touch.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Popular culture is hardly visible at all. Nicholas does goes to the cinema, but we are not told what he sees. Only when his landlady has a few critical words to say about Diana Dors do we get the slightest whiff of what the majority of Londoners would have been consuming in their cultural lives. Only Christopher mentions anything that seems to have got into the book during its revision for publication in the late 1950s. At one point, he says 'I'm not an existentialist'. This is, characteristically, a statement not of philosophical principle but of incapacity—and, moreover, of incapacity for which he disclaims responsibility: 'No one has ever been able to explain it to me as a layman'. But at least he is aware of a trend. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Christopher also says to Michael, who has served in the Royal Air Force, 'Living in the peaceful welfare state is terribly frustrating. You'll just have to join the ranks of the angry young men and suffer.' The birth-date of the British welfare state tends to be given as July 1948, when National Assistance, National Insurance and the National Health Service came into force. The writer Leslie Paul published an autobiography called <i>Angry Young Man</i> in 1951. His expression was then taken up to describe the characteristics, or the mood, of a generation. It became a particularly important epithet in reference to characters in contemporary drama. Christopher's remark seems to be guiding Michael towards the genuine<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>crucible of artistic activity in London, a long way further down the social scale than the snobbish Patrick.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Common accounts of the immediate post-war period in Britain offer a diorama of unrelieved gloom: austerity, social conformity, surveillance, puritanism, Cold War paranoia, nuclear anxiety... But the characters in the book seem detached from this context: Patrick is rich enough to rise above it, and for as long as he enables them, his prot<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">é</span>g<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">é</span>s follow him into a realm above income, almost above politics. What few political references there are might have been written in the original 1940s version or in the 1950s re-write. Lord Winterborn, whom Patrick regards as a 'mad socialist', is said to be still upset at not having been offered a Cabinet post by the 1945-1951 Labour Government of Clement Attlee. Stuart Andrews wonders if the government (but which government?) is going to call a general election—clearly, the sort of question an editor need to be asking himself. Patrick thinks Greece an unsuitable place to visit with his new prot<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">é</span>g<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">é</span>, presumably because of ongoing problems caused by British involvement in Cyprus. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If it is satire, what is it satirising? There is too little identifiable social context for it to be a political commentary. Yet, for those in the know, it must have been a rather obvious <i>roman à clef</i>, based on the lives of easily identified, living members of the English literary scene. Michael Nelson had some experience of literary London, having worked as secretary to John Lehmann (1907-1987), a poet and the prominent editor of <i>New Writing</i> (later to be reincarnated as <i>Penguin New Writing</i>). It is clear that he had met enough of the literati to know how some of them operated, and it seems possible that he had been on the receiving end of enough of their disdain to have wanted to get his own back. How many readers will have been aware of it is open to question, but for certain insiders Ronnie Gras is based on Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), editor of the literary magazine <i>Horizon</i>. Patrick is based on Peter Watson (1908-1956), who had co-founded <i>Horizon</i> with Connolly, funded it and acted as its art editor. Christopher is based on the poet Stephen Spender (1909-1995), who also worked on the magazine. And Nicholas, fecklessly passive and lacking in initiative, is a rather unattractive (even if physically desirable) authorial self-portrait: a boy seeking an effortless entry to the world of the arts; or rather, to its upper stratum, where money is no object. (And, as we all know, that is not where any art of real quality is ever created.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The novel begins in a manner both outspoken and vague: 'He was very, very rich.' This is not exactly Jane Austen, whose opening paragraphs tend to locate her characters financially; but it does what it needs to. It tells us what people know about Patrick, why he is admired, and the source of his power over other men. He is the sort of man who returns to London because it is raining in Paris. He dislikes anything he cannot control. Nicholas is apparently closeted: '<a href="mailto:closeted@I"><span style="text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="color: navy;">I</span></span></a> wish you wouldn't do that in public,' he says when Patrick tries to hand him some money in the bank; 'It makes me feel uncomfortable'. And yet, even while he is saying this, he has taken Patrick by the arm to lead him down the steps of the bank to his car. So it is not the mere fact of an intimate relationship that he is trying to hide, but a monetary arrangement. It is not that he fears being thought homosexual, but that he does not want to look like a kept boy. It is no accident, thinking of the inscription of identities, that the more tense moments in the incipient career of a semi-prostitute take shape around signatures: the counter-signing of a restaurant bill, the failure to sign a cheque... Patrick is probably better off with a working-class boy than with the likes of Nicholas. Thinking of himself as a Pygmalion-figure, an artist in the flesh, he needs someone he can manipulate, a male Galatea whose tastes and teeth he can re-shape to meet his own impossible standards.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There is a rather chilling scene in which a valet attached to Patrick's apartment building intimidates Nicholas, clearly aware that he is just another in a line of younger men who have passed through Patrick's flat. Nicholas is so cowed by the insinuations of this man that he imagines he might say, at any moment, 'Come off it. Stop giving yourself airs. I know all about you. You're just another one-night stand. At least my job's steadier than yours.' Even without saying anything so impertinent, the valet exudes an air of menace, perhaps more of a threat to the absent Patrick than to Nicholas, whom he has identified as a mere transient and therefore of no consequence. Any man so patently in the know about Patrick's only flimsily discreet personal life is a potential blackmailer. The fact that this is not mentioned shows the extent to which Michael Nelson deliberately steps aside from the expected script about the position of the homosexual in society. Reading this scene in 1958, a homosexual reader would have shuddered of his own accord.<o:p></o:p></div>
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[This essay was written to serve as the introduction to the new Valancourt Press edition (2013) of Michael Nelson's novel.]Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-73666444087854944322013-09-19T02:26:00.001-07:002013-09-19T02:32:08.094-07:00The Radetzky March<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There are occasions when a queer character will barely announce his/her spectral presence in a modern novel—with a handful of standardised clues—before vanishing without trace of person or purpose. Lieutenant Kindermann in Joseph Roth’s <i>The Radetzky March</i> (1932) is one such. Carl Joseph, the novel’s central character, finds him ‘more reassuring than the rest’ of his fellow officers, because he is less obviously militaristic than they. Indeed, his presence is undemonstrative almost to the point of invisibility:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">He consisted of a blond, rosy, transparent substance; one could almost have reached through him as through an airy haze in evening sunlight. Everything he said was airy and transparent and was breathed from his being without diminishing him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">He is a ‘cheerful nonentity’ with a ‘high voice’ which, in contrast with the baritone of one of his colleagues, ‘sounded like a gentle zephyr grazing a harp’. His equivocal way of speaking extends, also, to the unmilitary softness of his vocabulary and his gestures:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Kindermann, ever intent on making up for his scant interest in women by feigning a special attentiveness to them, announced, ‘And his wife—do you know her?—a charming creature, a delight!’ And at the word <i>delight </i>he raised his hand, his limp fingers capering in the air.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But when contact with women threatens to become too intimate he falters. Caught up in a drunken regimental visit to a brothel, he cannot hide his agitation, which extends to physical illness:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Kindermann felt faint whenever he smelled naked women; the female sex nauseated him. Major Prohaska had stood in the toilet, earnestly striving to thrust his stubby finger down Kindermann’s throat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As the seductions begin, ‘Lieutenant Kindermann blanched. He was whiter than the powder on the girls’ shoulders’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And that is just about it. He has hardly any further role to play in the novel. Just once, a couple of chapters later, when Carl Joseph is feeling ill while on the parade ground after witnissing a fatal duel, Kindermann takes out ‘a coquettish pocket mirror’ to hold up to his eyes so that he can see how pale he looks. If one can isolate any single narrative purpose in the brief existence of this character, it is to identify Carl Joseph, by contrast, as not being queer. Unimpressed by the militaristic bluster of his colleagues, a bit of a loner, and one who hardly associates with women at all, even in the brothel scene—although he does later have a rather sketchily outlined affair with an older woman—at least Carl Joseph is not the kind of man who carries a mirror about his person.<br /><br /><br />[Joseph Roth, <i>The Radetzky March</i> (London: Penguin, 2000), pp.68, 73-74, 75, 110.]<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-81260616448944230482013-09-18T06:02:00.000-07:002013-09-18T06:02:26.564-07:00Miss Lonelyhearts<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">One among many grotesque incidents in Nathanael West’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miss Lonelyhearts</i> (1933) occurs in the chapter called ‘Miss Lonelyhearts and the clean old man’. After getting drunk in a speakeasy, the book’s eponymous central character, who works as a newspaper’s agony aunt, staggers into a park with his friend Ned Gates to get some fresh air. In the park’s ‘comfort station’ they encounter an old man sitting on the closed lid of one of the toilets. Gates sings ‘If you can’t get a woman, get a clean old man’ and they drag him out into the park. His fear and passivity excite them: ‘Miss Lonelyhearts fought off a desire to hit him’. They now take him drinking and insist on his telling the story of his life. When he demurs, Gates says, ‘We’re scientists. He’s Havelock Ellis and I’m Krafft-Ebing. When did you first discover homosexualistic tendencies in yourself?’ The old man becomes indignantly defensive and tries to strike Miss Lonelyhearts with his cane, but Gates disarms him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This moment of violence appeals to Miss Lonelyhearts’ sadism: ‘Miss Lonelyhearts felt as he had felt years before, when he had accidentally stepped on a small frog. Its spilled guts had filled him with pity, but when its suffering had become real to its senses, his pity had turned to rage and he had beaten it frantically until it was dead’. He now takes over the interrogation from Gates, going at it with fresh enthusiasm, and when Gates suggests they stop because ‘The old fag is going to cry’, Miss Lonelyhearts replies, ‘No, Krafft-Ebing, sentiment must never be permitted to interfere with the probings of science’. The old man does, indeed, start crying and when he refuses to tell his story, Miss Lonelyhearts begins violently twisting his arm. Only when somebody hits Miss Lonelyhearts with a chair does he desist from tormenting the man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To locate what ‘humour’ there is in this scene from a ‘comic novel’, one has to distinguish firstly between ‘jokes’ and then between the audiences which can plausibly be expected to find them ‘funny’. Gates and Miss Lonelyhearts are enjoying themselves at the expense of homosexuals and sexologists; even, perhaps, of science as a whole. It may be that the author is having the same laughs. There is no obvious indication of his distance from his characters here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[Nathanael West, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miss Lonelihearts and A Cool Million</i> (Harmondswoth: Penguin, 1961), pp.24-26.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-46143643909621257752013-09-09T07:53:00.001-07:002013-09-09T07:53:24.158-07:00Anonymity<div class="MsoNormal">
[This is an item I first published in <i>Anon</i> 2 (2004), pp.46-48.]</div>
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I sometimes think I should write every poem of mine
as if it were an anonymous letter, deceitful and wounding, swift to the
point, stark in message but in voice undependable: ventriloquistic,
plagiaristic and synthetic. It should arrive
in the hands of the reader as if slipped under her door late at night
by a malicious hand. Anonymous never takes the blame. The rest of us
have to account for our failings.</div>
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Anonymous was a woman veiling her gender, a
homosexual expressing his sexuality through the gag of social
convention, a radical dissembling her dissidence, an aristocrat holding
himself aloof from the sway, a libeller ducking responsibility
for the forthrightness of his views, or just a shrinking violet, modest
to the point of invisibility. Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929, ‘I would
venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing
them, was often a woman’. Marilyn Hacker wrote
in 1978, ‘Women and other radicals who choose / venerable vessels for
subversive use / affirm what Sophomore Survey often fails / to note: God
and Anonymous are not white males’.</div>
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As for me, I like to think it was the same
Anonymous who wrote ‘Sumer is icumen in’ and ‘There was a young lady
from Exeter’. Prolific and haphazard, Anonymous’s genius is too
mercurial to pin down. Like Ariel, Anon can change his gender
and finesse her way through the confining walls of definitions and
categories. How can we ever attack him, when she is invisible? Yet
how can we grant him more than the marginal status of her virtual
absence? It will never be possible to love his work
as a whole, since we can never be sure she wrote it, or that his later
work is by the same hand as her juvenilia. Besides, isn’t there always
something deceitful about Anonymous? Does she really imagine we can
trust him?</div>
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When I.A. Richards handed out poems to his students
at Cambridge in the 1920s, but withheld the names of the poets, he was
famously horrified by what he regarded as the ignorance of their
responses. They slated poems by John Donne, D.H.
Lawrence and Gerard Manley Hopkins, preferring the work of poetasters
little known then, let alone now. Richards wrote up his findings in
<i>Practical Criticism</i> (1929), thereby initiating a whole new trend
in university teaching and examining. For decades it became common
practice to withhold information about poets and their societies while
discussing their poems. The central plank of
the New Criticism of the 1950s was that the poem must and does work in
isolation. Biography and social context were irrelevant, impertinent;
as was the writer’s other work. To read a poem without knowing the
poet’s name was to see it in its purest condition.
And to be able to infer the poet’s name from nothing but the poem was
the skill literature students were expected to acquire.</div>
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Today, the poems submitted to this magazine, <i>Anon</i>,
are to be assessed under similar conditions, isolated from context. In
terms of the judging of merit, this means isolated from prejudice—which
can only be a good thing. The poem
must speak for itself.</div>
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The benefits of this innovation are obvious to
those of us who work in universities and routinely mark essays and exams
with the names of the students concealed. It is obvious that this
helps us avoid prejudging the work, for whatever
reason. Yet in the refined world of poetry magazines, the principle of
anonymous selection is considered revolutionary. Perhaps it
intimidates the famous, or others who imagine themselves famous
enough—and therefore good enough as poets—never to be rejected.
If so, let them be intimidated; they need to be. The rest of us will
take our chances alongside everyone else. If the process scares us,
perhaps it will force us to write better poems. If that proves
impossible, rejection is what we deserve. Nothing is
to be gained from a system that rewards poets for their names rather
than the self-evident quality of their work.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-4768577683030997862013-09-09T07:47:00.003-07:002013-09-09T07:48:51.060-07:00Opportune Immunity<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">[This is the proposal for an essay I have been meaning to write, 'Opportune Immunity: AIDS and the American Canon'.] </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There is no reference to AIDS in Thomas Pynchon’s
<i>Vineland</i> (1990). It does not ‘matter’ that there is none, but
what, if anything, does it ‘mean’? Some readers might be tempted to
suggest that a novel set in 1984 with a major character who is a hooker
ought to have registered in some way the existence
of the epidemic or of safer sex; or, indeed, that a novel purporting
to—or reviewed as if it did—look at the changing state of the Union
since Vietnam should show some sign of knowledge that AIDS was an
important, burgeoning event in the nation’s literal and
figurative health. Moreover, as a connoisseur of the conspiracy
theory, Pynchon might have found theories of the origins of AIDS
pertinent to the development of his typical interest in paranoid plots.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"> Thinking
along the same hypothetical lines, one could ask: what ever became of
the scathing Gore Vidal essay about the Reagan state’s negligence?
Where was the Norman Mailer exposé of the same?
Where was the William Burroughs novel about AIDS being just another
aspect of viral take-over? As many have been asking for many years now,
we might ask of the canonical American novelists, what did you do in
the AIDS war, daddy? Interviewing Vidal in 1992,
Larry Kramer had the temerity to say: ‘You’ve not spoken too much about
AIDS’. Vidal replied: ‘I’m not a hand-wringer. If I don’t have
anything useful to say, what am I to say? It’s a terrible thing. Of
course it is. AIDS hasn’t come to me closely except
in my own family’. (His nephew, the painter Hugh Steers, had been
diagnosed HIV-positive eight years previously.)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> [</span></span></span></a></span><span lang="EN-US">Larry Kramer, ‘The Sadness of Gore Vidal’, in
</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Gore Vidal, <i>Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings</i> (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1999), pp.255-256.]</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></span></span></a></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Ronald
Reagan was justifiably much criticised for ignoring the AIDS epidemic,
which began—and began to flourish—on his watch. But what of the
straight, white, male dinosaurs of the American
fictional canon? Given their secure reputations for accurate and
wide-ranging portrayals of contemporary American society, it may be
worth checking on their progress in this respect by considering how they
responded, in their novels, to the first two decades
of the AIDS epidemic. In contrast with prominent gay writers
(Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, etc.),
heterosexual male writers had a much more patchy record in even
commenting on, let alone grappling with the detail of, a crisis
which once threatened to wreak major demographic and cultural changes
across the Republic.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Looking
at both passing references to AIDS and much fuller developments of the
epidemic’s effects on individuals as well as on the broader society, the
essay will consider passages in the following
nine major State-of the States novels: Tom Wolfe, <i>The Bonfire of the Vanities</i> (1987), Joseph Heller,
<i>Closing Time</i> (1994), John Updike, <i>In the Beauty of the Lilies</i> (1996), Saul Bellow,
<i>The Actual</i> (1997), Don Delillo, <i>Underworld</i> (1997), Philip Roth, <i>
American Pastoral</i> (1997), Tom Wolfe, <i>A Man in Full</i> (1998), Saul Bellow,
<i>Ravelstein</i> (2000) and E.L. Doctorow, <i>City of God</i> (2000).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">AIDS
appears most often in these texts as a sign of the times, typically
alongside such other social indicators as urban graffiti, soaring crime
rates and visible homelessness. The epidemic
tends to be mentioned merely for the purposes of dating and locating a
given narrative—dating it at the apocalyptic
<i>fin de siècle</i> and locating it in the hellish city of
postmodernity. AIDS hardly exists in human terms in these novels, but
functions instead as a symbolic indicator of the consequences of
free-market Reaganomics; or else, as in Bellow’s
<i>Ravelstein</i>, the personal account of a friend’s illness and death
is almost completely divorced from the social context of the most social
epidemic of recent times.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-87685781616317950502013-09-09T07:41:00.002-07:002013-09-09T07:42:38.739-07:00Other Avenues<div class="MsoNormal">
An information pack entitled <i>How to Get Your Poetry Published</i>, circulated by the Poetry Society, contains the following gem of practical advice under the heading ‘Other Avenues’:</div>
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<b>Alternative publishing.</b>
If your work is all on one theme (e.g. gay or lesbian poetry, Christian
poetry, Environment poetry) then you should look for publication in the
relevant scene rather than in the
poetry press, for instance Onlywomen Press or the SPCK.</div>
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This ignorant dismissal of gay or lesbian poetry as
being ‘all on one theme’, and the relegation of such obsessively narrow
writing to the margins, where writers cannot even expect to get
published, let alone be received with respect, is
not by any means an untypical approach. The fact is that the British
poetry scene is reactionary, nostalgic and prejudiced. The reputations
of many of its star turns depend on an exclusivity that maintains an
embargo on true diversity. Experimentalism is
beyond the pale, as is pretty much anything that amounts to a
conviction. As for ‘Christian poetry’ and ‘Environment poetry’—so much
for John Donne, so much for Wordsworth. Let them peddle their narrow
obsessions from the margins and be ignored.
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When gay poetry does
make it on to a mainstream list, it continues to be reviewed as if it
should not have been allowed there at all. My own first collection,
<i>We Have the Melon</i> (Carcanet, 1992), was reviewed in the February 1993 issue of
<i>Envoi</i> by Eddie Wainwright. Having described the book as
consisting of ‘a certain brand of male homosexual sex poetry’, but
without naming the brand or showing any sign that he knew of other
brands, he speculated: ‘I suppose somebody will call this kind
of writing a celebration of something or other’. Even when conceding
that I display ‘a good deal of skill with words and poetic forms’, he
had to add that ‘what is in question is the cause which such skills
serve’.</div>
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Quoting Thom Gunn—‘I
recommend this book to everyone’—Wainwright disagrees: ‘I would have
thought it was unlikely to stimulate the sympathies of those who do not
share its narrow focus’. The phrase ‘stimulate
the sympathies’, with its suggestion of a diddling finger or
masturbating hand, is Wainwright’s way of trivialising not only the
writing but also the reading of gay poetry. The suggestion is that a
poet like me writes pornography, and that the only kind of
reader who could possibly like my poetry is one who masturbates to
it—necessarily, therefore, a gay man. But not only that: a gay man with
no interest in poetry itself. The only way to appreciate this muck is
with an ejaculation. For my part, I have no
objection to that mode of reading; I merely believe there are many
other ways into my books. Yes, there are even portals broad enough for
the dull-witted heft of the heterosexual male. (Or for that rare type
represented by Wainwright, the only type of reader
he seems to be reviewing for.)</div>
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A recent review of Robert Hamberger’s latest book begins: ‘<i>The Smug Bridegroom</i>
is a collection of poems about the disintegration of a marriage and
family life and the establishment of a new and entirely
different relationship.’ At no point in the review that follows can
the reviewer bring himself to mention that this new relationship is
‘entirely different’ (as opposed to just different?) because it is gay.
In poems of great subtlety and technical finesse,
and without unneeded ostentation or concealment, Hamberger gives as
clear an insight into love’s routines and surprises as I have recently
seen in any British poetry. Mind you, the back-cover blurb of the book
itself does no better: it speaks only of ‘the
break-up of marriage and renewal of hope’. The publisher, Five Leaves
Press, evidently feels no one will buy it if they know it is gay. And
perhaps he is right. I am reminded of the blurbs on video/DVD boxes.
Even films with major gay themes are presented
as if no such themes were there, lest nobody should want to buy or rent
them. Pink pound or not, queerness is still uncommercial. (By today’s
standards, that means immoral.) Maybe the poetry market really is
currently so depressed that one needs to pander
to the prejudiced in order to survive. In my experience, booksellers
like Waterstone’s cannot decide which is going to be the greater
turn-off for their customers: to put a book in the gay section (if they
have one) or in the poetry section.</div>
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In a mad review of my last collection
<i>The District Commissioner’s Dreams</i> (Carcanet, 2002) in the <i>London Magazine</i>,
John Greening wrote, ‘I suppose a Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies
has a professional obligation to write about these things, but I’d have
welcomed a few poems about
trees or fly-fishing’. The information about my job does not appear in
the book under review, so Greening has imported it from elsewhere in
order to use it against my poetry. Quite what he imagines my
professional duties as consisting of is not clear—writing
poetry is certainly not a part of them—but my job serves his purposes
as a sign of incomprehensible apartness. The idea that gay experience
might have something to teach us all—indeed, the vast majority of my
students are heterosexual—does not even remotely
occur to him. It is not his experience, so he is not interested.
(Presumably, he has never understood the point of
<i>Anna Karenina</i> or <i>Madame Bovary</i> or <i>Hedda Gabler</i>
because he is not a suicidal adulteress.) Yet his own hobbies—he being
heterosexual and male—are so universal as to be a required topic in any
decent literature. (Presumably, he just skims
through Tolstoy and Flaubert and Ibsen, sniffing for a whiff of fish.)
Complacently assuming the rank accorded to majority status, he cannot
imagine that what interests him does not interest the world—and the
topics he values are therefore those that are
valuable. This is the purely statistical version of how to measure
literary worth. The problem is, of course, that even his statistical
understanding is suspect. I am willing to bet you that far more men on
this planet have sex with other men than fish
for fish with flies.</div>
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I try to imagine myself
reading John Greening’s very best poem about fly-fishing—if such a poem
exists—and complaining that, well-crafted though it might be, it was no
good because it lacked any gay sex. What
is the matter with such people? Can they really not bear to read about
things from beyond the narrow limits of their own experience? Do their
editors not care that this should disqualify them from reviewing at
all? It is as if the cosiness expected of English
poetry cannot sustain the sheer seriousness—the problem—of queerness.
Imagine the cultural consequences—going back to
<i>How to Get Your Poetry Published</i>—of a national poetry scene that
routinely excludes lesbian/gay work, Christian work and environmentalist
work, purely by identification of their topic. The implications for
our literature are serious, to say the least.</div>
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Given this atmosphere
within the poetry market, it is hardly surprising that those who police
the reputations of individual writers tend to try to prevent their being
limited by the lesbian or gay label. In 1988
Carl Morse and Joan Larkin failed to get permission to include
Elizabeth Bishop in their monumental
<i>Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time</i> (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1988). In 1995 Faber & Faber refused David Laurents permission to
print W.H. Auden’s poem ‘A Day for a Lay’ in
<i>The Badboy Book of Erotic Poetry</i> (New York: Badboy, 1995) and
the Auden estate actually threatened to sue if he went ahead, even
though the poem is readily available on the internet. In 1997 Random
House refused Neil Powell permission to use any Auden
poems in <i>Gay Love Poetry</i> (London: Robinson, 1997). And in 1998
the literary executor refused Gillian Spraggs permission to publish work
by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland in
<i>Love Shook My Senses: Lesbian Love Poems</i> (London: Women’s Press, 1998).</div>
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The point is that the
owners of such literature do not want their property to be reduced in
value. And for a writer to be labelled ‘a gay writer’ or ‘a lesbian
writer’ is almost always taken as a reduction in
value. John Lucas has said of the fact that, in <i>Gay Times</i>, Alan
Sinfield once called me ‘the foremost gay poet working in Britain’,
such labelling of writers ‘is to guarantee that they’re pushed to the
shady side of the street, especially when … the
description itself comes from a gay newspaper, so that the street may
seem to lead straight to the ghetto’ (<i>The Dark Horse</i>, Winter 2001-2002). As Susan Sontag once said to Edmund White, ‘Surely you don’t want to be just a
<i>gay</i> writer. Don’t you want to hit the big time?’</div>
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What I am addressing
here is a question of the ownership of that tattered commodity the
‘universal’. Is it universally available or not? The case of Thom Gunn
gives us a pretty clear answer. Gunn’s reputation
went into decline in the UK during the middle period of his career.
This was partly because he became too Californian in
<i>Moly</i> (1971)—too much free verse, too many free attitudes—but also because he then became openly gay in
<i>Jack Straw’s Castle</i> (1976) and <i>The Passages of Joy</i>
(1982). His gayness was treated in British reviews, when it was
acknowledged at all, as just another Californian distraction from the
serious business, and the serious topics, of poetry. But
his stock then rose dramatically when <i>The Man with Night Sweats</i>
(1992) was published. Now that it involved AIDS, his gayness was no
longer trivial. It became palatable at last: for, as I am constantly
finding in literary criticism, gay deaths can
be identified with by straight men, but gay love can not.</div>
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This tendency may also
help to explain why Mark Doty’s openly gay poetry has been subjected to
surprisingly little Greening-like resistance in Britain. Doty’s is a
world in which nothing is so earthy that it
cannot be compared to a precious ornament. His sensuousness is
aestheticised to the verge of pure theory. The fact that he writes so
impressively about his relationship with his male lover is rendered
acceptable by the context of AIDS and mourning. The
English poetic tradition finds elegy attractive, once the loved man is
dying or dead and therefore rendered harmless.</div>
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<i>How to Get Your Poetry Published</i>
refers to ‘other avenues’ available to lesbian and gay poets, but the
fact is that no such avenues exist, other than on-line. There is a lot
of gay and lesbian poetry on
the internet—more than we have ever seen before—but there are no
consistently reliable sites showcasing the best of such work. The
development of the net has both hindered and helped. But, in truth, gay
magazines and periodicals in Britain have not been publishing
verse for many years. The cultural journal per<i>versions </i>(1994-1996) could have carried poetry but never did. The
<i>European Gay Review</i> (1986-1992) only published work by anyone
famous enough for its editor to have heard of them; this restricted the
field. I did once manage to infiltrate a poem, ‘The Fire Raiser’ into
London’s gay newspaper
<i>Capital Gay</i>, but only because it was about an arson attack on the premises of
<i>Capital Gay</i> itself. Before that, the editors of the much-lamented <i>Square Peg</i>
did not appear to believe poetry could ever be trendy enough to fit in
with their admirably experimentalist ethos, but they did occasionally
overcome their scruples
on this point.</div>
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There has not been a consistently enthusiastic outlet for gay and lesbian verse in Britain since
<i>Gay News</i>, under the literary editorship of Alison Hennegan. I
remember, in particular, regularly seeing the work of Ivor Treby and
James Kirkup. Ironically, of course, it was poetry that more or less
finished off
<i>Gay News</i> when, in 1977, Mary Whitehouse took exception to
Kirkup’s fatuous poem ‘The Love that Dares to Speak its Name’ and made
sure that the newspaper was prosecuted for ‘blasphemous libel’. Sad to
say, the poem was not worth the eventual effect of
its publication—the killing off of the country’s main outlet for gay
verse (and many other things besides).
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No gay poetry publishing houses have
survived. The Oscars Press came and went, publishing chapbooks by new
poets and a sequence of impressive anthologies. Oscars luminaries
included Peter Daniels, Steve Anthony and Christina
Dunhill. (Brilliance Books flared up briefly, too, but although they
were daring, they had never had the nerve to publish verse. Nor did the
short-lived Heretic Books and The Trouser Press.) In the 1980s the Gay
Men’s Press used to put out two-poet collections,
under the poetry editorship of Martin Humphries, but the series was
discontinued for economic reasons. I remember being especially,
enviously impressed by Steve Cranfield’s collection, which Humphries
sensibly paired with his own in 1989. For a while it
seemed that there was a thriving gay poetry scene, if only in London.
Of course, some of our most promising writers have been lost to AIDS.
The very best of the Oscars poets was Adam Johnson. His posthumous
<i>Collected Poems</i> were published this year by Carcanet Press.</div>
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Yet there are still
plenty of gay poets around. Carcanet alone publishes a number of them,
besides myself, including David Kinloch, John Gallas and Roger Finch;
Edwin Morgan and John Ashbery; Edward Lucie-Smith
and Neil Powell. Elsewhere, Lee Harwood continues to produce some of
the most impressively sidelong takes on both male relationships and on
verse itself. The most well-known of the new generation of
Irish-language gay poets is Cathal Ó Searcaigh. And there
is always the venerable Thom Gunn. His last collection, <i>Boss Cupid</i> (2000), struck me as more impressive, even, than
<i>The Man with Night Sweats</i>. The whole book crackles with
disturbing splicings of the erotic and the deadly. Who could forget
Gunn’s grim variation on the
<i>carpe diem</i> entreaty, expressed from the serial killer Jeffrey
Dahmer’s point of view: ‘love must be ensnared while on the run, / For
later it will spoil’?</div>
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Before Andrew Motion was
appointed Poet Laureate in 1999, two lesbian poets, U.A. Fanthorpe and
Carol Ann Duffy, were spoken of as strong candidates. Jackie Kay, too,
was occasionally mentioned. From its dedication
(‘For Rosie as always’) onwards, Fanthorpe’s latest collection, <i>Queueing for the Sun</i>
(Peterloo, 2000) wanders gently back and forth between the first
persons singular and plural, with the effect of extending the refined
subjectivity of an alert and
sensitive poet’s mind to the shared experiences of loving
togetherness. In this respect, her ‘we’ reminds me of that of Elizabeth
Bishop in the Brazil-based poems she dedicated to the woman she loved.</div>
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Gay poetry has been
relatively under-researched by literary academics. Although there have
been books on individual authors, as far as I know there have been no
accounts of Anglophone gay poetry in general since
Robert K. Martin’s <i>The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry</i> (University of Texas Press, 1979) and my own
<i>Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry</i> (Yale,
1987). However, the Australian academic Paul Knobel is now writing a
history of gay poetry. Until that is finished, we have his
<i>Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and Its Reception History</i> (2002), a very wide-ranging CD-Rom (available from Homo Poetry, P.O. Box 672, Edgecliff, New South Wales, Australia 2027).</div>
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[This essay was first published in <i>Magma</i> 27 (Autumn 2003), pp.22-26.]</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-77241862686761945612013-07-24T03:39:00.000-07:002013-07-24T03:39:00.107-07:00Queering the Modern<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: black;"><o:p><strong>[My last gay studies course, <em>Queering the Modern</em>, ended in January 2013. I used this anthology of quotations to give students an idea of the context and potential scope of the course. I think it makes an interesting narrative in itself.]</strong> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">(All of these quotations are taken out of context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are included here, not as complete arguments in themselves, but to give a flavour of debates taking place within the period of this module.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in <i>The Descent of Man</i> (1871):</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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‘Man with all his noble qualities ... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900):</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Karl Marx (1818-1883):</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Károly Mária Kertbeny (1824-1882), writing in 1869:</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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‘In addition to the normal sexual urge in men and women, Nature in her sovereign mood had endowed at birth certain male and female individuals with the homosexual urge, thus placing them in a sexual bondage which renders them physically and psychically incapable—even with the best intention—of normal erection. This urge creates in advance a direct horror of the opposite sex, and the victim of this passion finds it impossible to suppress the feeling which individuals of his own sex exercise upon him.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black;">[This passage, translated from the German, contains the first published use of the term ‘homosexual’ (‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homosexuel</i>’).]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx (22 June 1869): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">‘</span>The paederasts are beginning to count themselves and find that they make up a power in the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only the organization is lacking, but according to this [<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ booklet <i>Incubus</i>]</span> it already exists in secret … It is only luck that we are personally too old to have to fear that on the victory of this party we must pay the victors bodily tribute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the young generation!’<o:p></o:p></div>
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John Addington Symonds, <i>A Problem in Modern Ethics</i> (1891):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘If we cannot alter your laws, we will go on breaking them.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Oscar Wilde, on trial in 1895, referring to letters he had written to Lord Alfred Douglas:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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‘“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, where the elder has intellect and the younger has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Oscar Wilde:<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘The world is slowly growing more tolerant and one day men will be ashamed of their barbarous treatment of me, as they are now ashamed of the torturings of the Middle Ages.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), speaking of his lover, George Merrill:</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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‘On one occasion he was standing at the door of our cottage, looking down the garden brilliant in the sun, when a missionary sort of man arrived with a tract and wanted to put it in his hand. “Keep your tract,” said George. “I don’t want it.” “But don’t you wish to know the way to heaven?” said the man. “No I don’t,” was the reply, “can you see that <i>we’re in heaven here</i>—we don’t <i>want</i> any better than this, so go away!” And the man turned and fled.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935):</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Beneath the duality of sex there is a oneness. Every male is potentially a female and every female potentially a male. If a man wants to understand a woman, he must discover the woman in himself, and if a woman would understand a man, she must dig in her own consciousness to discover her own masculine traits.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Futurist Manifesto, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909):<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice. […] We will glorify war—the only true hygiene of the world—[and] the beautiful ideas which kill.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Henry Ford (1863-1947):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.’ (<i>Chicago Tribune</i>, 25 May 1916)<o:p></o:p></div>
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James Joyce (1882-1941), in <i>Ulysses</i>, referring to the character Stephen Dedalus, based on himself:<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘“History,” Stephen said, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”’ <o:p></o:p></div>
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Robert Musil, <i>The Man Without Qualities</i> (<i>Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften</i>), volume one (1930):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘From the moment Ulrich set foot in engineering school, he was feverishly partisan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who still needed the Apollo Belvedere when he had the new forms of a turbodynamo or the rhythmic movements of a steam engine’s pistons before his eyes!’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Le Corbusier (1887-1965):<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘A house is a machine for living in.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Mina Loy, ‘Feminist Manifesto’ (November 1914):</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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‘Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited ... [T]he first self-enforced law for the female sex, as a protection against the man made bogey of virtue, which is the principal instrument of her subjection, would be the <i>unconditional</i> surgical <i>destruction of virginity</i> throughout the female population at puberty ... For the harmony of the race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments—free of stress.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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T.S. Eliot (1888-1965):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Marcel Proust (1871-1922)</span> in <i>Sodome et Gomorrhe</i> I, 1921:<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘I have thought it as well to utter here a provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing ... to create a Sodomist movement and to rebuild Sodom. For, no sooner had they arrived there than the Sodomites would leave the town so as not to have the appearance of belonging to it, would take wives, keep mistresses in other cities where they would find, incidentally, every diversion that appealed to them. They would repair to Sodom only on days of supreme necessity, when their own town was empty, at those seasons when hunger drives the wolf from the woods; in other words, everything would go on very much as it does to-day in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd or Paris.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black;">René Crevel (1900-1935) in <i>La Mort Difficile</i> (1926):</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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‘As long as people think it’s a vice, as long as they are looking for an amusing spectacle or at the very least an assortment of strange quirks which it is their pleasure to judge reprehensible but rare, like Oscar Wilde’s orchids, then the reaction is one of respectful interest. But let someone come along whose sufferings in love are not betrayed by comical eccentricities or increased either by social persecution or the threat of prison or the dictates of fashion, but a man whose sufferings are wordless and quietly eat him up inside, people who were hoping for outlandish scenes, spicy anecdotes, scandalous gossip, will never forgive the commonplace simplicity of such a passion.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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André Breton (1896-1966) in his magazine <i>Surrealist Revolution</i> in 1928:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">‘I accuse the homosexuals of affronting human tolerance with a mental and moral defect that tends to advocate itself as a way of life and paralyze every enterprise I respect. I make exceptions, one of which I grant to the incomparable Marquis de Sade.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Colette (1873-1954) in <i>The Pure and the Impure</i> (1932, 1941):<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">‘The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), on visiting an exhibition of children’s drawings:<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘My music is best understood by children and animals.’ (October 1961)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Walt Disney (1901-1966):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Girls bored me—they still do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘When we have found how the nucleus of atoms are built-up we shall have found the greatest secret of all—except life. We shall have found the basis of everything—of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small—except life.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Albert Einstein (1879-1955):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pablo Picasso (1881-1973):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), in <i>Sexual Behavior in the Human Male</i> (1948):<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘The world is not divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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In a public discussion at the Western Round Table in 1949, arguing against Modernism in the visual arts, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright asked ‘if this movement which we call modern art and painting has been greatly, or is greatly, in debt to homosexualism’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In response, the artist Marcel Duchamp agreed that this had probably been the case, but he clearly felt that modern art was all the better for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He added: ‘I believe that the homosexual public has shown more interest [in] or curiosity for modern art than the heterosexual.’<span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">André Gide (1869-1951):</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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‘It is better to be hated for what one is than loved for what one is not.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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Raymond Chandler, <i>The Long Goodbye</i> (1953):<o:p></o:p></div>
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Wade says to Marlowe: ‘<span style="color: black;">The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.’</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-46830425760578686642013-07-19T03:13:00.000-07:002013-07-19T03:13:12.311-07:00Gregory Woods: An Interview<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">[Andrés Lomeña, “Entrevista con Gregory Woods”, <i>Cronopis</i> (Barcelona: Universidad autónoma de Barcelona, May 2007). My <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">History of Gay Literature</i> was translated as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Historia de la Literatura Gay</i> (Madrid: Akal, 2001).]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">You develop a fascinating route across male homosexual literature with your <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">History of Gay Literature</i>. From Catullus, Virgil or Horace to Marcel Proust, we have a western gay tradition, hushed up, hidden. I guess your work has been controversial, but you fill a huge gap of literary studies. What other gaps should we cover? (For example: lesbian, post-colonial, black or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mestizo</i> literature.)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">Canons are exclusive by definition (that is why they are useful) yet they are never beyond reproach, and they are never static.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if there are gaps, how should we seek to fill them?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Socially or aesthetically?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do we need literature that will encourage an egalitarian society, or do we need magnificent books?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Some books, but few, can perform both these functions.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People tend to complain about canons as if they were imposing impossible demands upon the reader, whereas, in fact, by being rigorously selective, they help the reader to avoid reading books that might be a waste of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this sense, they are generous and sympathetic, rather than punitive, to the reader who has not read everything.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">You invite us to go over our cultural history. A new canon might redefine our conception about authors and masterpieces. For example, the feminist canon introduces new writers. However, when we construct a feminist canon, we are implicitly accepting the “Western” canon (as Harold Bloom showed us, for instance), the establishment. Would it not be better to reintroduce minority discourses (gay and lesbian studies) within the universal canon?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">The smallest minority is that of the individual reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have no objection to her being taught, or given access to, the ‘great books’ of the Western canon, so long as she is also taught that the canon always serves particular interests in society, and always occludes others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The canon must be supplemented by guidance on its alternatives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may be that each reader needs several canons, sequentially or simultaneously: an aesthetic one, a social one, a traditional one, an experimental one...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps more than ever, now that the book is said to be under threat from screen-based visual cultures, the main use of a canon is to encourage selective and intelligent reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may be conservative or it may be radical; but it is more likely to be the latter, since true intelligence always seeks to change things for the better, rather than to accept them as being unchangeable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">You are explicit declaring your homosexuality in your book. As far as I am concerned, I think that is a honest proposal, splendidly managed by Adrienne Rich´s poetry. On the other hand, it seems a requirement (I should introduce myself as a heterosexual reader). I have the feeling that we mark people as a function of their sexual or economical condition (or whatever: I’m thinking about vegetarian people and their ideas). For example, thinkers cannot explain the work of Michel Foucault putting aside his homosexuality. How could we avoid this prejudicial approach? Is that impulse of transparency strictly necessary for sincere dialogues?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">There can be no fixed rules about such matters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the present moment in the struggle, we can see that lesbian and gay visibility has been politically useful; but it has also taken its toll on those who have acted as representative homosexuals in the public eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We should not have to be advertisements for ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today I want to be invisible, tomorrow I want to impose my queerness on a mass audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today I want to be celibate, tomorrow I want to be a promiscuous slut.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Walt Whitman said: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">Donna Haraway’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Queer Theory or Cyborg Manifesto</i> talks about the abolition of binaries (masculine/feminine, and so on). I usually have trouble understanding this postmodern language. So, what does it mean to us in a real context? How can we live overcoming our biological and cultural barriers?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">The main route to breaking down these crude systems is the treatment of other human beings as individuals rather than types.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is much easier said than done—but then so were Chastity and Obedience, in a previous moral code.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It involves dedication and generosity, an openness to difference...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">Homosexual marriage is already possible in Spain. Also adoption. What achievement is still a Utopia at this moment?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">I never believed that gay marriage was a desirable institution; nor did I think it was worth fighting for the right to join the army.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if one believes in the principles of equality and freedom of choice, one has to accept, however reluctantly, that these are positive developments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More important, though, is the development of rational sex education in schools, and subculturally supportive social care for elderly lesbians and gay men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also desirable would be a general recognition that romantic love is itself a product of, and subject to, historical forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like any controlling ideology, it is coercive and exclusionary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being single is not such a bad thing as we are constantly being told.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">You have written about homo-eroticism. What do you think about the function of eroticism in our society? And about pornography?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">Eroticism is to the mind what sex is to the body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its function is, like that of viniculture and <i>haute cuisine</i>, the generation of pleasure and (for its exploiters) profit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those of us who were brought up as Catholics know a lot about the veneration of icons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The boys in my favourite porn magazines and websites are sources of great wonder and reassurance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They remind me, not just that flesh is beautiful, but that it is all-important.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its pleasures compensate for its pains.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its youth compensates a little for mortality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">7)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">There are mothers who fathered their children and fathers who mothered their children. Are the familiar roles an artificial fabrication? Where are the theoretical limits of gender?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">If it is true, as Judith Butler argues, that gender is performative, there is no reason to think of it as having limits, other than those exerted by social pressure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our new understanding of gender opens us up to limitless possibilities—if we could only stop parents and schools indoctrinating children into the narrow cells of traditional roles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Imagine a school playground in which there were as many genders as there were individual children!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">8)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">As readers, what is the benefit of reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Billy Budd</i> by Melville and other stories as a homosexual story (in a hermeneutical sense)?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">Each era, each culture, reads a book in its own way, even if informed by previous readings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not an evangelist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not regard the ‘gay reading’ of such a classic text as the revealed truth, more authentic than any previous or alternative reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the benefits is to the book itself, giving it new layers of meaning, and new generations of readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ‘queering’ of classic texts always reminds me of Borges’s Pierre Menard, independently writing his own <i>Don Quixote</i>, with all of the same words in exactly the same order, but ending up with a completely different book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">9)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">You presuppose a gay reader for gay literature. Anyway, what “gay” novel or work of art do you recommend to us?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">Since we should always be sceptical of fixed ‘identities’ based in areas as volatile as sexuality, the ‘gay reader’ may be little more than a convenient fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my own critical work, he is based on myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My gay reader has my own eclectic tastes, with little residual interest in the coming-out stories of teenage boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having said that, I also have in mind the young reader, such as I was forty years ago, who needs to find in books the image of his or her own possible futures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my own reading practices, now, in my mid-fifties, I seek literatures that are ‘queer’ to the point of exhilarating complexity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I do not want to see queerness being made palatable to the bourgoisie.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although I no longer read him very often, Jean Genet is the great model of this kind of writer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, too, are Juan Goytisolo, William Burroughs, Pierre Guyotat, Monique Wittig...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not merely that they recognise the complexity of sexuality itself, and say surprising things about it, but that they do so in a literature that is itself radically innovative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="ES-TRAD" style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">10)<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span></b><b><span lang="ES-TRAD">Anything you would like to add</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="ES-TRAD">?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="ES-TRAD">There are dangers in the acceptability queer/gay studies have won in the academic world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would like to issue a warning against accepting queer theory too readily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was largely shaped around the needs and interests of Anglophone academics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if it has its origins in the work of continental Europeans like Michel Foucault, their distinctive Europeanness tends to be resolutely ignored in the UK and the USA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The desire for ‘queer’ to become a universal currency should be aggressively resisted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our own local theologies of sexuality should stand up to the evangelizing zeal of queer-theoretical Conquistadores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They may be carrying something worse than syphilis: intellectual uniformity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-18829240415158657782013-07-19T02:56:00.002-07:002013-07-19T02:56:26.591-07:00Gay Literature: An Introduction<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">[I first wrote this item for </span>Fedwa Malti-Douglas (ed), <i>Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender</i> (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), Vol. III, pp.896-899]<b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">In its broadest sense, gay literature is that which expresses, describes or otherwise represents a spectrum of intense friendship, love, erotic desire and sexual contact or relationship between male individuals, as well as engaging with the social context of how these matters are received by the broader society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such literature might be produced within any literate culture at any point in human history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More narrowly, some commentators would argue that the concept of gay literature should be confined to a specific period since the late-nineteenth-century conceptualisation of sexual ‘identities’, whereby homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality are regarded as psychological states or conditions affecting the whole nature of the self and its social circumstances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, by its narrowest definition, gay literature dates from the mid-1960s in the West, and is written only by gay authors, especially by openly gay authors who subscribe to the aims and ethos of the gay liberation movement, which, following the models of the American civil rights and feminist movements, demanded equality of rights and treatment for gay people across the spectrum of social institutions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Throughout the history of literacies, the predominant mode of male homo-erotic writing has been determined, not by some universal essence of homosexual love, but by broadly common social and cultural conditions, centring on sexual segregation and male privilege.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wherever female virginity was prized above the education of girls, men made deeper alliances with each other than with women. Honoured as a bearer of sons and strengthener of the bloodstock more often than as a soulmate, the high-born woman was protected against the acquiring of knowledge as much as she was protected against the eyes of the wrong men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Relationships between men were built on common interests stemming from shared levels of education, and relationships between men and boys were pedagogical, educating the boy up to the level of the man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ideally, therefore, a meeting of bodies would eventually develop into a meeting of minds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Greek Anthology</i> is an abundant repository of such celebrations of boy love in its different moods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most fully theorised in Plato’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Symposium</i>, Greek pederasty was governed by strict conventions that protected the reputations of male citizens and the boys—future citizens themselves—they loved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While not arguing against sexual relationships, or at least those tempered by rational self-control, Plato’s dialogue recommends the refinement of love that transcends bodily need.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar affirmations of institutionalised pederasty are to be found in the literatures of <st1:country-region w:st="on">China</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Japan</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">India</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Persia</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Turkey</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the Arabian diaspora.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Much Greek poetry cites the precedence of the febrile passions of the gods when justifying humanity’s self-evident frailty in matters of the heart and lower organs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where Zeus and Ganymede, or Apollo and Hyacinth, went before, mortal men and boys were apt to follow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, men’s taste for boys was meticulously traced backward to its origins in a moment of divine inspiration on the part of an individual man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This candidate for the honour of being the first mortal man to desire his own sex was sometimes identified as Orpheus, sometimes as Thamyris, and sometimes as Laius.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Significantly, the first two of these were themselves poets.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Many Roman poets, similarly, wrote erotic verse about boys—Virgil, Martial, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius and Catullus being prominent examples—but they also wrote, and wrote more, about women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The love of boys was never regarded as being incompatible with that of women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Correspondingly, Roman literature is often insulting about men with an exclusive interest in the same sex, and all the more insulting if any adult man showed signs of sexual passivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Juvenal’s satires are exemplary in their contempt for such abdications of the manly duties of citizenship.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of all the classical literature of male love, Plato’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Symposium</i>, Theocritus’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Idylls</i>, Virgil’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eclogues</i> and Ovid’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metamorphoses</i> had the most radical impact on man-loving and Man-loving, humanist poets of the Renaissance period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd and Richard Barnfield’s Ganymede come from writers obviously steeped in the homo-erotic classics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare’s sonnets, though relatively sparing in their classical references, are clearly derived from an ethos the poet had taken from his extensive reading of southern European literature and adapted to his own hyperborean emotional life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The controversy of the sonnets is not a recent one—as is often claimed—imposed on them by the irrelevant obsessions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century homosexuals. As early as 1640, John Benson reissued the poems, cutting some of them altogether (19, 56, 75, 76, 96, 126), changing the gender of the pronouns in others (101, 108) and toning down such phrases as ‘sweet boy’ (108) and ‘fair friend’ (14) to ‘sweet love’ and ‘fair love’ respectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The publisher was concerned to avoid any impression of sinful practices.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In Christian Europe, the condemnation of all sex but a narrow range of acts within the marital bed gave forbidden love a new status among the upper classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In literature, such diverse figures as Pietro Aretino, Théophile de Viau, John Wilmot (the Earl of Rochester) and the Marquis de Sade made a virtue of vice, boastfully expatiating on the ambisexuality of the libertine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This tradition in its turn helped shape a particular kind of fictional character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Byronic hero and the Gothic novel’s anti-hero, perhaps themselves derived from such darkly seductive figures as <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Milton</st1:place></st1:city>’s Satan, evolved, by way of major characters like Vautrin in Honoré de Balzac’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Comédie humaine</i> and the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A la recherche du temps perdu</i>, into the gay villain of mid-twentieth-century fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The demonisation of Oscar Wilde in 1895 added a fresh resonance to this stereotype of the sodomite as being criminally seductive and subversive.<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Across cultures and eras, one of the most acceptable, and therefore common, ways of celebrating passionate friendships between adult men has been in circumstances, or through representations, of mourning. In the Sumerian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Epic of Gilgamesh</i>, Gilgamesh extravagantly mourns the death of Enkidu. In the Bible, David laments the loss of Jonathan: ‘I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women’ (2 Samuel 1: 26). In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>, Achilles laments the loss of Patroclus. In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chanson de Roland</i>, Roland laments the loss of Olivier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The English pastoral elegy celebrated male love, usually in its most conventional guise as temperate friendship, all the way through literary history from Edmund Spenser to A.E. Housman and Wilfred Owen. Again, the circumstance of mourning released writers from some of the restraints on intensity of expression where male love was concerned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’ commemorated Sir Philip Sidney, who had died in 1586. John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ commemorated Edward King (d. 1637); Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ commemorated Richard West (d. 1742); Percy Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ commemorated John Keats (d. 1821) (Shelley’s own heart would be wrapped in a manuscript of the poem during his cremation on the beach at La Spezia); Alfred Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ commemorated Arthur Hallam (d. 1833); Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ commemorated Arthur Clough (d. 1861); and Walt Whitman’s poems from the American Civil War, culminating in the great elegy on Abraham Lincoln, ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,’ resonated with echoes of the same sources.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">While it was often received by man-loving male readers in England as being ‘Greek’ in spirit, Whitman’s quintessentially American poetry was far more inclined to celebrate the adult male—and the working-class male at that—as something entirely new and particular to the physical geography and social structures of the United States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Whitman, spiritual refinement is derived not from education and class but from bodily health and liberty.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Heterosexuality and homosexuality, those new definitions of sexual identity that emerged through the popularisation of sexology and psychoanalysis in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, coincided with other major technological, aesthetic and social developments that have since come to be seen as having the common characteristics of Modernism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In literature, the Modernist experiment was especially concerned to temper the objective focus of high realism with more subjectivist approaches to a reality increasingly assumed to be pluralist and fragmented.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The objective, omniscient narrator of the realist novel gave way to a stream of individual consciousnesses.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Under these new conditions, writers seemed especially enabled to scrutinise the voluntary and involuntary bases of sexual desire in its protean manifestations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of the great Modernist writers were homosexual or bisexual themselves and took same-sex desire as one of their major topics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Marcel Proust, André Gide and Jean Cocteau combined major technical innovations with penetrative explorations of the nature of desire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>, the novels of Thomas Mann and the poetry of Stefan George wrestled with the relationship between physical and spiritual desire as embodied in ethereal boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Greece</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Constantine Cavafy elaborated a comparison between classical pederasty and modern homosexuality in poems that gave modern urban cruising its finest early expression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At opposite extremes of seriousness and frivolity, Henry James and Ronald Firbank approached the matter of love from an oblique angle that is identifiably ‘queer’ or even camp, subjecting heterosexuality to the distanced scrutiny of a discriminating aestheticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, there is so much gay writing in Modernism that one might even go so far as to describe that movement as being intrinsically queer.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The anti-homophobic novel of the twentieth century almost invariably suffered the consequences of its own inbuilt flaw.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Needing to argue, politically, the ordinariness of homosexuality and the moral neutrality of homosexual love, such novels were burdened with the necessity of a dull central character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hence the unremarkable suburbanism of the eponymous central character of E.M. Forster’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maurice</i> (first drafted in 1913).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Setting himself the task of countering prejudicial assumptions that the homosexual men must be decadent, effeminate and untrustworthy—a stereotype largely based on the version of Oscar Wilde that had been constructed in newspaper accounts of his trials—Forster had to contrast the dullness of the middle-class Maurice with the far more interesting figure of Risley, an aristocratic aesthete who is witty and seedy and ends up in jail.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Much the same can be said of the protagonists of some of the best-known gay novels published in the middle of the century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of these men are tediously self-absorbed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Gore Vidal’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The City and the Pillar</i>, Jim Willard is given a strong backhand at tennis so as not to be assumed to be effeminate by homophobic readers, but that is his only talent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The literature informed by the post-war homosexual and gay movements was principally concerned with conveying what came to be called ‘positive images’, whereby the author was expected to counter negative public representations of homosexuals as (variously) untrustworthy, unpatriotic, unmanly, neurotic, immature and generally unlikeable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Positive gay literature had to convey the possibility of homosexual happiness, broadly within the requirements of social convention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Central characters of such novels would overcome the adversities of having to endure homophobia, would experience true love, and would eventually settle down to a solidly happy ending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Subsequent literature has, by and large, been released from these restrictive imperatives.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Given the restrictive tendencies of politically-led literary texts, it is hardly surprising that much of the most striking fiction about male-male relationships was the most transgressive, often elaborating on the interplay between eroticism and violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this respect, the towering figure of the mid-twentieth century was Jean Genet, whose work depended for one of its main effects, not on the idea that men who love men can be as decent and unobtrusive as your next-door neighbour, and that books about them can be similarly unexceptional, but on the idea that all love involves personal betrayal and that male bodies are the weapons with which both love and betrayal are to be effected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Japan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Yukio Mishima superimposed the Samurai and ancient Greek traditions of homo-eroticism on the quotidian detail of modern life, enlivening a realist perspective with his own sado-masochistic interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>, encouraged by younger Beat writers like Brion Gysin and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs combined an aggressive social critique with the celebration of a taste for adolescent boys in heroin-fed fantasies of a womanless universe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The technique of randomly cutting up his prose denies his characters any sentimental identification on the part of sympathetic readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Netherlands</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Gerard Reve based his own radical aesthetic on an obsessive regard for the corporal punishment of socially deviant boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similarly, in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Tony Duvert wrote as if the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nouveau roman</i> had been hijacked for the purposes of a militant pederasty.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The changing possibilities for the more assimilationist gay writer might best be exemplified in the career of the post-war British poet Thom Gunn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gunn began as a poet of restraint, guarded and edgily ironic, his poems virtuosic in the application of seventeenth-century techniques and forms to decidedly modern topics (Elvis Presley, leather-clad bikers).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His tone of voice combined <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Cambridge</st1:place></st1:city> refinement and erudition with a held-in masculinity derived from American movies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as the 1950s and 1960s progressed and he moved to <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">San Francisco</st1:place></st1:city> to live with his American lover, Gunn discovered a more flexible technique to accompany his newly relaxed, Californian lifestyle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adopting a syllabic line that owed much to the American models of William Carlos Williams and Yvor Winters, and associating the consequent lightening of tone with his own coming-out as a gay man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The later collections were all openly and relaxedly gay.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The elegiac tradition of earlier centuries offered a ready template for consolatory lamentation when the AIDS epidemic disproportionately affected gay men in Western cities in the 1980s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the face of intense hostility from the political classes and the mainstream media, gay men sought understanding voices within their own suffering communities and were answered in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">USA</st1:place></st1:country-region> by such poets as Thom Gunn and, more recently, Mark Doty and Rafael Campo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was distinctive about such writers was their capacity to turn personal involvement in the epidemic—and personal grief—into a reaffirmation of the highest principles of gay liberation, akin to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">amor vincit omnia</i> (love conquers all) of the ancients.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One of the commonest themes in contemporary gay fiction is the family: that is, the families from which young gay individuals emerge, the families that closeted individuals construct by marrying and having children, and the alternative families that ‘liberated’ individuals develop out of new social circumstances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Informed by feminism’s critique of the coercive nuclear family, as well as by conservative retrenchments claiming the nuclear family as the only socially and morally responsible mode of living, gay novelists have sought to show both how oppressive and harmful the heterosexual family structure can become, and yet how protective and nurturing different structures, imaginatively constructed according to the needs of individuals, can be if the concept of family is allowed to expand and develop flexibly, encompassing fresh sexual and affectional arrangements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Major late-twentieth-century gay novelists included, in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Britain</st1:country-region>, Alan Hollinghurst and Patrick Gale; in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">United States</st1:country-region>, Edmund White and Andrew Holleran; in <st1:country-region w:st="on">France</st1:country-region>, Yves <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Navarre</st1:place></st1:country-region> and Dominique Fernandez.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">BIBLIOGRAPHY<o:p></o:p></span></h1>
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Bredbeck, Gregory W.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:city w:st="on">Ithaca</st1:city> & <st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Cornell</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place> Press.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Frantzen, Allen J.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1998.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from</i> Beowulf <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to</i> Angels in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:city w:st="on">Chicago</st1:city> & <st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Chicago</st1:placename></st1:place> Press.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hammond, Paul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1996.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love Between Men in English Literature</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>: Macmillan.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Lilly, Mark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1993.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>: Macmillan.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Martin, Robert K.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1979.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:city w:st="on">Austin</st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Texas</st1:placename></st1:place> Press.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Robinson, Christopher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1995.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>: Cassell.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Smith, Bruce R.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1991.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:city w:st="on">Chicago</st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Chicago</st1:placename></st1:place> Press.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Summers, Claude J.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1995.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>: Holt.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Summers, Claude J.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1990.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gay Fictions, Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>: Continuum.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Woods, Gregory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1998.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">New Haven CT</st1:address></st1:street> & <st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Yale</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place> Press.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Woods, Gregory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1987.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">New Haven CT</st1:address></st1:street> & <st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Yale</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place> Press.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-361881194005082935.post-64086649066456294022013-07-19T02:46:00.000-07:002013-07-19T02:46:05.084-07:00Auden's Platonic Blow<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">“The Platonic Blow” (or “A Day for a Lay” or “The Gobble Poem” as it has also been called) is the best-known and most substantial of a small number of erotic poems Auden wrote, not for publication but for the private amusement of close friends. In a letter to Chester Kallman on 13 December 1948, Auden wrote: “Deciding that there ought to be one in the Auden Corpus, I am writing a purely pornographic poem, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Platonic Blow</i>. You should do one on the other Major Act. Covici would print them together privately on rubber paper for dirty old millionaires at immense profit to us both. (Illustrations by [Paul] Cadmus?)” The poem was about Auden’s favourite sexual activity, fellatio; the “other Major Act” he refers to, more to Kallman’s taste, was anal intercourse. One reason for his writing it was to show Norman Holmes Pearson of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Yale</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place>, with whom he was about to co-<st1:personname w:st="on">edit</st1:personname> a poetry anthology, the kind of person he was. In this sense, it is a clear statement not only of personal interest, but even of basic identity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">After the poem had been published, against his will, by the arts magazine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fuck You</i>, in New York in 1965, Auden complained to Monroe Spears: “in depressed moods I feel it is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i> poem by me which the Hippies have read” (18 November 1967). It was also published by a magazine more appropriately called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Suck</i>. Among friends, Auden openly acknowledged authorship of it. The British politician Tom Driberg recalled an occasion when, visiting the poet for lunch in <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>, he was given a privileged reading. Auden also read part of it from a hot tub at a spa on <st1:place w:st="on">Ischia</st1:place> to the visiting German student Peter Adam, later a distinguished broadcaster. Auden even, once, admitted to the mainstream press that the poem was his (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daily Telegraph Magazine</i>, 9 August 1968). However, when <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avant-Garde</i> published it in March 1970, again without permission, and even had the courteous nerve to send the poet a fee, Auden returned the cheque and repudiated authorship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Like so much of his verse, “The Platonic Blow” is a technical tour de force. It adopts a syncopated measure Auden found in the Arthurian cycle <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taliessin through Logres</i> (1938) by the British Roman Catholic poet Charles Williams. He made more polished use of the form, later, in the second section of “Memorial for the City” (1949), which is dedicated to the memory of Williams. As much of Auden’s obvious pleasure in the erotic poem derives from the wickedness of its sexually explicit parody of a deeply serious, spiritual book as from the sexual narrative itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">The poem consists of thirty-four stanzas of four lines each, rhymed ABAB. The lines range in length from ten to sixteen syllables, but they all have five insistent stresses. The vocabulary combines unexpected archaisms (“lofty”, “beheld”) and apparently inappropriate formal expressions (“sutures”, “ineffably”, “capacious”, “indwelling”, “voluminous”) with the erotic demotic (“cock”, “arse”, “knob”, “hard-on”, “spunk”). The insistency of his internal rhymes (“fresh flesh”, “the charms of arms”, “the shock of his cock”, “quick to my licking”, “sluices of his juices”, “the notch of his crotch”, “spouted in gouts”) and half-rhymes (“slot of the spout”, “curls and whorls”) seems clumsy at first, but soon gathers momentum in vivid mimesis of the act they represent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">The narrative itself is entirely conventional, in a literal sense slavishly following pornographic precedent. Spoken from the point of view of the adoring cock-sucker, it follows a familiar route from the picking-up of an attractive stranger to consummation and ejaculation. Faced with the body of a young man, the speaker is at a rhapsodic pitch throughout. The object of his attention corresponds with Auden’s ideal image of the American dreamboat: “Present address: next door. / Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest [?] From Illinois. / Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.” He is blond. To an extent, it does not matter whether this boy is actually homosexual. Auden believed, in any case, that straight American men did not really care for sexual intercourse with women: they just wanted to get blown while reading the newspaper. His fantasy was to be the one who did that favour.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">In this written version of the fantasy, however, the blown man reciprocates. Before the speaker can begin sucking him, without being asked, Bud undresses fully. When the speaker, too, has undressed, they kiss. He fucks the speaker intercrurally. The speaker then explores the whole of his body, including his armpits and arse. Bud even has a voice of his own: when the speaker finally gets round to sucking him he “hoarsely” says: “That’s lovely! … Go on!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Go on!” Later, he whimpers expressively, “Oh!”, and, as he is about to ejaculate, “O Jesus!” This man is, then, a co-operative version of Auden’s American stereotype, a young man who seems unashamed to involve himself in a mutual homosexual act, but one who ultimately submits to the imperative of the exploring mouth and becomes completely passive in the face of its unrelenting onslaught.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">According to Harold Norse, who had first-hand experience, regardless of his enthusiasm for the act Auden was actually an inept fellator: ‘the more feverishly he labored, the less I responded’. There is no such discomfort in ‘The Platonic Blow’. Only the gay Japanese poet Mutsuo Takahashi’s long poem ‘Ode’ outdoes it in exuberant celebration of the cocksucker’s art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Auden, W.H., ‘The Platonic Blow’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts</i> 1 (March 1965)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Auden, W.H., ‘The Gobble Poem’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Suck: The First European Sex Paper</i> 1 (October 1969)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Auden, W.H., ‘A Day for a Lay’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avant Garde</i> 11 (March 1970)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Auden, W.H., <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collected Poems</i>, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>: Faber, 1976<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Carpenter, Humphrey, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">W.H. Auden: A Biography</i>, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>: Allen & Unwin, 1981<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Norse, Harold, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memoirs of a Bastard Angel</i>, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>: <st1:place w:st="on">Bloomsbury</st1:place>, 1990<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Woods, Gregory, ‘W.H. Auden’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry</i>, New Haven & London: Yale, 1987<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105438004657038684noreply@blogger.com0