AIDS Drama

Astrid Haas, Stages of Agency: The Contributions of American Drama to the AIDS Discourse (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag WINTER, 2011)

In Stages of Agency, Astrid Haas gives a brisk and very fully researched survey of the most significant American plays that have addressed the AIDS epidemic as their central theme. In accordance with the specific manner in which this catastrophe unfolded—now, since 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and so forth, largely forgotten except by those it most directly affected and goes on affecting—the theatre of AIDS began with a concentration on white gay men before turning to the experience of ethnic minority communities and women. (White, heterosexual men have been characterised mainly as the villains of the piece.)

            The disproportionate way in which AIDS first affected, and was first observed among, gay men determined the hostility with which it was treated by mainstream media and the languor, not to say fatal negligence, with which official agencies responded, or refused to respond, to it. Only when government could be persuaded that not just faggots but anyone—and, in particular, ‘The Family’—was at risk, was anything like a suitable emergency response forthcoming. (This same pattern was observed in most of the developed nations.) Later, around the turn of the 1990s, gay activists and writers had to ‘re-gay’ the crisis in order to try to ensure that what meagre funds had been released for the fight against AIDS would not, absurdly, disproportionately, be spent only on ‘respectable’ groups, who were actually those least affected.

            Following the same pattern, AIDS drama began and ended (for other topics have now taken over the public interest) as gay drama, and only in a brief interim period did it temporarily focus on minority ethnic groups and women qua people-with-AIDS rather than merely as the family or friends of such people. So Haas’s account begins with in 1985 with William H. Hoffman’s As Is and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, the latter written at the very Ground Zero of the crisis, autobiography functioning as agitprop, and urgently aiming to change both the sexual and political behaviours of gay men; and her account ends with Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998).

Between these two poles, Haas pays detailed attention not only to Tony Kushner’s bloated Angels in America (1991, 1992), whose main purpose appears to be to transcend the epidemic by drawing palatable, general conclusions from it about equality and fairness, within a context of etiolated, secular spirituality; but also to such plays as Cheryl West’s Before It Hits Home (1991), the most prominent AIDS play by an African-American writer, and Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz (1991), another of only very few by women to have been widely performed and reviewed.

The research is dutiful, methodical—and dull. It would be difficult to pinpoint a strong opinion of Haas’s own. Everything is footnoted. To the claim that in Larry Kramer’s The Destiny of Me ‘an acerbic wit tones down the moments of anger’, she adds the footnote ‘Cf. Destiny 132, 139-46, 149, 155-62, 167, 177-79, 183-84, 189-92, 195-97, 206, 211, 213-15, 227-33, 241-43, 246, 250-51’ (p.166). What one is supposed to do with such lists of page numbers is unclear.

The limitations of each play are listed, mainly along the lines of which issues do not arise and which constituencies are not addressed. There is a crude understanding of how audiences relate to characters, all of whom are treated by Haas not as roles but as ‘role models’. The fact that Chay Yew’s play A Language of Their Own (1995) has only one white character, who is also the only individual who has no connection to the ‘world’ of AIDS ‘allows white viewers to dissociate themselves from AIDS and affirm the widespread racist pathologization of people of color as disease-ridden’ (p.259). This could only hold true if an audience ignored all previous knowledge of the epidemic. Does Haas really expect a playwright to restate the whole history of AIDS, to avoid the chance that one Rip Van Winkle will find himself in the stalls? The same train of thought leads her into the absurd position of implying that a playwright should not write about gay men with AIDS because it ‘reinforces the ongoing essentialist, pathologizing popular connection of the syndrome to gay men’ (p.283). If one follows this approach to its logical conclusion, ever daring to write anything about AIDS is going to pathologize someone or other. Would Haas prefer a discreet but egalitarian silence?

But the silliest moment of all is when Haas says, of re-reading The Normal Heart twenty-five years on, that currently rising HIV rates among American gay men have ‘provided the play with a tragic dimension’ (p.121). What on earth did she think it had in 1985?

The book has been poorly proof-read and lacks an index.

[This review first appeared in the Journal of American Studies (November 2012).]

Douglas Cooper and John Richardson

There is often something of the adult cultural individualist in the badly behaved child.  Douglas Cooper once phoned his mother, pretending to be a policeman, and said to her: ‘I regret to inform you that your son has committed suicide.  We will have to ask you to identify the body’.  Early cultural influences included his homosexual uncle Gerald Cooper, who took him in the mid-1920s when he was twelve or thirteen to see the Diaghilev company performing in Monte Carlo.  Douglas Cooper was educated at Repton and, from 1929, Cambridge, where he was so flamboyantly queer that Nicholas Lawford, later a diplomat, chased him with a hunting crop.  He left, however, to study art history and, in the words of John Richardson, to take up ‘the pursuit of cubist works of art and good-looking young men’.  The decision to collect cubism had arisen out of his despair at the Tate Gallery’s unadventurous approach to modern art; by the outbreak of the Second World War he had amassed 137 paintings, with his main concentration being on works by Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Leger.  In the summer of 1938, Cooper fell asleep at the wheel of his car and in the ensuing crash lost the sight in one eye.  Exempt from military service in the war, he went to Paris to join Count Etienne de Beaumont’s ambulance unit (as Jean Cocteau had done in the first war); Beaumont’s great distinction in his eyes was, of course, that he had commissioned work by the likes of Picasso, Braque and Eric Satie.  Later, in RAF intelligence, Cooper became an interrogator of prisoners of war in Cairo – ‘Torquemada could hardly have done better’, as he put it himself.  In Cairo he made friends with Patrick White, whose relationship with the Alexandrine Greek Manoly Lascaris gave him bouts of envy and a strong sense of what a good homosexual relationship might amount to.  Cooper was eventually transferred to Malta after he successfully interrogated but who subsequently killed himself.  At the end of the war he joined the Monuments and Fine Arts branch of the Control Commission for Germany, charged with the pursuit of Nazi loot and looters.  Back in London in 1947, Cooper moved into the new Egerton Terrace house of ‘Basil’, the Hon. Sholto Mackenzie, later Lord Amultree.  The two had had a sexual relationship in the 1930s, but were now no longer lovers.  Here Cooper started writing the argumentative art history for which he would become widely known.

Viva King, the wife of a curator at the British Museum, used to hold Sunday parties in her Thurloe Square house, which used to be attended by the likes of Norman Douglas and Angus Wilson.  She had a particular affection for artistic boys, to the extent that the phrase ‘a friend of Mrs King’ briefly became a euphemism for homosexual.  Douglas Cooper referred to her as a ‘Poufmutter’.  Here, at one of her Sunday dos, Cooper met a young man called John Richardson.  John Richardson had been educated at Stowe – where ‘A special  veneration for the grottoes and temples that dotted the park resulted from their being the scenes of my first sexual experiences’ – and then at the Slade, which had been evacuated to Oxford for the duration of the war.  Nothing much came of the first meeting, since Richardson was panicked by the apparent advances of the older man and fled the house.  In the meantime, Richardson got reviewing work on the New Statesman through its assistant literary editor T.C. Worsley; the two of them went together to the theatre, which Worsley reviewed, and the ballet, which Richardson reviewed.  In the spring of 1949, Worsley took Richardson to a party which John Lehmann was holding to celebrate the publication of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.  Cooper and Richardson encountered each other again, and Richardson asked if he could see Cooper’s art collection.  (Francis Bacon had warned him that he would have to sleep with Cooper before he got to see the art.)  They went to the Egerton Terrace house and, with a certain reluctance on the younger man’s part, slept together.  Gifts of flowers and cigars arrived the next day, and then Cooper took Richardson off to Amsterdam to tour the museums and galleries.  Between June and October 1949, they went off on a Grand Tour, initially in the company of the set designer James Bailey, whom they dumped in Paris.  There, Richardson met Picasso for the first time.  Feverish for a while, Cooper underwent examination by the dandyish and ineffectual Jacques Lacan.  Eventually, Richardson went down to Naples on his own to meet up with T.C. Worsley and cross to Ischia, where the two of them stayed with Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman.  The young American poet James Schuyler, too, was there, and Richardson was instantly ‘dazzled’ by him.  One night they made love, apparently watched by Auden and (perhaps) Worsley – but to do so was frowned on, and Worsley took Richardson away, under the cloud of Auden’s retrospectively prim disapproval.  Back in London, Richardson moved in with Cooper and MacKenzie in Egerton Terrace.

1950s

Douglas Cooper and John Richardson had happened upon a derelict chateau near Nimes, the Chateau de Castille, which Cooper decided to buy.  They gradually did it up and filled it with the art works from Egerton Terrace.  They neglected, though, to install burglar alarms.  A near-neighbour was Marie-Laure de Noailles, whose home was always full of young musicians, straight and gay, some of whom were her lovers.  (Ned Rorem lived there for seven years.)  Castille being only fifteen miles off Route Nationale 7, the chateau frequently welcomed visitors: Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in the summer of 1952; the historian James Joll and the lover he met at Castille, John Golding, whose thesis on cubism Cooper was supervising at Anthony Blunt’s behest, but who would go out of favour when his work became obviously more scholarly than Cooper’s own; Nancy Mitford; Cyril Connolly, who arrived uninvited but appeased Cooper with his mimickry of such mutual friends as Brian Howard, Alan Pryce-Jones and Maurice Bowra; Anthony Blunt, who came most summers, usually accompanied by his beloved John Gaskin; Angus Wilson, who had upset Richardson by basing Terence Lambert, in Hemlock and After (1952), on him; and even, briefly, the Queen Mother.  There were trips to bullfights with Picasso and, sometimes, Jean Cocteau.  They stuck rigorously to their own priorities.  So, although they met the aged Winston Churchill, but they turned down lunch with him so that they could eat, yet again, with Picasso.  Formal occasions in their lives, if there had to be any, could always be enlivened by bad behaviour or by the whimsy of chance.  In the peers’ stand outside Westminster Abbey on the day of the Coronation, Cooper loudly booed the arrival of the star of the show, Elizabeth Windsor (the younger).  Back in France, at the funeral of ‘the flamboyant fashion designer’ Jacques Fath, the flowers were mixed up with those for an old woman who was to be buried on the same day.  His coffin bore a wreath with the words ‘A notre tante adoree’.

The relationship between Cooper and Richardson faltered a number of times before it ended for good.  On the first occasion of serious rupture, the younger man went to New York, where it happened that John Hensbeen had just moved in with Philip Johnson, so Richardson was able to move into Hensbeen’s apartment; and he spent that Christmas in the incomparable surroundings of the guest house at Johnson’s Glass House complex in New Canaan, Connecticut.  Through Helena Rubenstain he met Tamara de Lempicka.  Truman Capote, an old friend of Cooper’s, kept him amused in the city by taking him to a lesbian bikers’ haunt, which they had to leave in a hurry because Capote said he was fearful of being raped.  Back with Douglas Cooper, Richardson went down to Florence to stay with Henry Clifford, curator of painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and his wife: ‘After a few days in this sumptuous house, I began to see the secret garden in its extensive, terraced grounds ‘as a metaphor for the private life of our host, who devoted a lot of time to doing flower arrangements with his friendly Italian butler’.  Cooper and Richardson lunched with Harold Acton.  In Venice they stayed with Graham Sutherland and his wife, in a house lent to them by Arthur Jeffress.  (The story of the latter’s demise is instructive.  At a grand party, the Duchess of Windsor asked him for a lift home; but his gondoliers had gone off on a jaunt, so he sacked them.  They in turn denounced him to the police, who happened to be purging Venice of homosexuals.  Jeffress fled to Paris, where he killed himself.)  In September they went to Les Baux to watch Cocteau filming Le Testament d’Orphee  on the day Picasso was due to be in it.  Serge Lifar was there, too, attempting to resurrect his reputation after having collaborated during the war. At lunch with Cocteau, Richardson noticed that he had used grey crayon to obscure his bald patch.

After a bad Christmas at the chateau, Richardson finally decided to leave Cooper and make a new life for himself.  He left Nice on 30 December 1960, heading for New York.  Douglas Cooper often tried to obstruct his career thereafter.  When Richardson was running the Dunn International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Cooper mischievously got himself appointed to the organising committee.  In Richardson’s account, Cooper appointed ‘an ambitious young porter’ called Bruce Chatwin as his ‘cats’-paw.’  Whenever Cooper required him to, Chatwin would appear in Richardson’s office, ‘with a supercilious smirk on his pretty face’, and deliver Cooper’s ‘insultingly officious messages’.  On Chatwin, Richardson grudgingly concedes that ‘when Bruce subsequently reinvented himself as a writer we became friends – sort of’.

Source: John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper (London: Cape, 1999)

Edward James

A figure who materialises in many memoirs of the inter-war period is the writer and artist Edward James.  According to his biographer:

Edward [James] freely admits to homophile leanings at various times in his life: he has been in love with men as well as with women.  There is a sequence of sonnets he wrote some time in the mid-forties invoking a journey with a loved one from Oregon down through California and Arizona to the Mexican border; one line reveals that the companion is a man.  Another attachment mellowed into a friendship that has lasted thirty years.  In Hollywood he moved a good deal in gay circles [and frequented gay bars] and was once arrested by, he says, an agent provocateur from the Vice Squad who fortunately couldn't make the charge stick.  But he insists that he never wanted to consummate a relationship with another man.  He likes women too much.

James was reputed to be the illegitimate son of Edward VII.  He was born on 16 August 1907, nine months after the King’s 19 November visit, one of many, to West Dean Park, Chichester, the home of Mrs and Mrs William Dodge James.  However, James himself had letters to his mother from the King which established to his satisfaction that she was not the King’s mistress but his daughter.  Edward James was just five when William Dodge James died , leaving him little more than the admittedly extensive land, 10,000 acres, of West Dean Park.  The boy eventually went to Eton—where he was a contemporary, but no great admirer, of Harold Acton’s—and to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1926.  There, his contemporaries included Tom Driberg and, for a year, W.H. Auden.  James co-edited the Cherwell with John Betjeman, who was at Magdalen.  It was James who published Mount Zion, Betjeman’s first poetry collection. 

            He left Oxford after only six terms and went off to Berlin, where he stayed with Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.  There followed a calamitous stint as an Honorary Attache in Rome.  For a start, contrary to all the best diplomatic traditions of discretion, he arrived there in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.  Then he rented not one but two fourteenth-century mansions: the Palazzo Celesia and the Palazzo Orsini, one on either bank of the Tiber, connected by two bridges and a small island.  Guests sometimes dined in one and took coffee in the other.  Worse, however, than this ostentation, which left the Ambassador himself in the shade, was the incident which led to James's leaving the service in October 1930.  One Sunday when he was on duty, intelligence came through that, contrary to the terms of the Locarno Treaty, the Italians had laid down the keels of three warships at La Spezia.  Somehow, in his coded message to London, James managed to say that there were three hundred such ships.  As a consequence, Ramsay MacDonald had to cut short his weekend at Chequers.

            Back in London, Edward James took a lease on 35 Wimpole Street.  Having developed a taste for working artists, he started hanging around Rex Whistler's studio.  It took the intervention of Oliver Messel to persuade him that his presence there was actually stopping Whistler working.  His new friends in London included the likes of Edith Sitwell, Lord Berners and Noël Coward.  At twenty-one he inherited a fortune from an uncle who had died before he was born.  In 1930, the James Press, his own publishing house, brought out his own Twenty Sonnets to Mary, which, according to his biographer, consisted of poems ‘evidently written three years earlier to a girl (or boy) who otherwise seems to have left no enduring impression’.  The following year, he married Tilly Losch, an actress and dancer he had first seen three years beforehand in Noël Coward’s revue This Year of Grace.  Having assumed he was queer, and yet gone ahead with the marriage regardless, the bride was pleasantly surprised by his sexual ardour.  As for that suspicion of queerness, ‘She remained half-convinced of it, or alternatively chose to revive the suspicion as soon as she tired of the marriage’.  Indeed, on the second day of married life, when their train to San Francisco stopped at Reno, she said, ‘Let’s have the divorce now’.  On their honeymoon in Hawaii he kept photographing a beach boy whom she later found in their room.  Her husband claimed the boy was helping him close their trunk.

            Edward James published his own Hawaiian poems in The Next Volume (1932), with illustrations by Rex Whistler.  He paid for Les Ballets 1933, a programme of three ballets, to showcase his wife.  It included L’Errante, designed by Pavel Tchelitchev.  However, the marriage came to its end in 1934 in a very messy divorce, with public accusations (infidelity, homosexuality) on both sides.  James's novel The Gardener Who Saw God (1937), published with a cover design by Pavel Tchelitchev, contained a character based on the author’s friend Lord Berners.  (The fictional Lord Bullborough has ears built on to his house.)  When Tchelitchev brought his American boyfriend Charles Henri Ford to West Dean, Ford made every effort to get James interested in surrealism.  Although it seemed, at first, that he might not succeed, before long James had become one of surrealism’s most discerning and enthusiastic collectors.

            Friendships ensued with both Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali.  Magritte painted a double portrait of a rear view of James in his celebrated work Le Reproduction Interdit.  In 1938, Dali and James visited Sigmund Freud in St John’s Wood, with Dali’s painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus, which belonged to James.  Freud’s only comment was ‘Warum die Ameisen?’ (Why the ants?).  James also owned Dali’s Autumn Cannibalism, plus many Magrittes and works of other modernist masters.  West Dean being too big, he had let it in 1937 and moved into nearby Monkton House.  Originally designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the rather dull neo-Georgian box was utterly transformed by James into a surrealist fantasy palace.  The furnishings included the famous Mae West sofa, designed by Dali specifically for Monkton.  Three of Edward James’s own surrealist poems would be set to music by Francis Poulenc.

            Edward James’s poetry collection The Bones of My Hand was published by the Oxford University Press, subsidised by the author, in 1938.  Stephen Spender gave it a hostile review in the New Statesman.  James subsequently believed that it was this one review that put an end to his literary career.  Attracted to California by Gerald Heard and Vedanta, James became a disciple of Swami Prabhavanandra; but as a millionaire, he was not taken seriously by Heard.  Christopher Isherwood became a friend in this milieu, and in Hollywood James met up with many European refugees, including Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and visitors, including Somerset Maugham.  Although James did nothing warlike in the war, typically he gave rise to persistent but unconvincing rumours that he was a secret agent.

Source: Philip Purser, Where Is He Now?  The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James (London: Quartet, 1978), pp.38, 35, 37.

Simon Raven

The novelist Simon Raven’s attitudes were shaped by his schooling, and many of his experiences at school reappear in his fiction. In May 1936 he was sent to Cordwalles School in Camberley, where boys aged between nine and thirteen were initiated into pre-pubertal group sex by the master who taught English and games, an ex-army officer.  In 1939, he was reported and had to leave, but the report was evidently not forwarded to the police, since he went on to found and run a school of his own. After the outbreak of the war, Simon Raven was moved to another prep school, St Dunstan’s at Burnham-on-Sea, before going on to Charterhouse in 1941. He was homosexually active and open at school, but he took the time in 1944 to dispose of his heterosexual virginity, at a cost of one pound, with a tart in the West End of London.

His great glory year, which he never bettered, was the next: the war had ended, Raven had won his First XI (cricket) colours, and he was having an affair with a beautiful boy (‘Alexis’ he later called him). In his 1961 book The English Gentleman, he wrote of how the affair fitted into the context of the boys’ classical education: ‘My attitude was measured against what I honestly believed to be the best possible frame of reference for such matters—the utterance and custom of the ancient Greeks’. These reminiscences, understandably, offer an intensely romanticised and eroticised representation of public school life—‘long hours of cricket in the sun (oh, those white flannels and the faint, sweet smell of sweat)’—which, in other moods or by other boys, could otherwise be recalled as brutal and exploitative. Anything, of course, can be endured and transformed if you are in love. Many years later, Raven recalled the most important details: Alexis had

A Greek beauty with handsome, regular features, classic torso and legs and the most beautiful uncircumcised cock I have ever encountered. The prepuce went slowly back leaving a slightly damp and sweet-smelling surface. I was only allowed to feel it and never saw it come. Pity.

There were copious compensations, however, which Raven took whenever the opportunity arose, and eventually he was caught—in the autumn of that same, best year.  In the ensuring scandal it was established that he had had sexual encounters with many other boys; but what did for him was the fact that one of them—just one—was two years younger than himself. (He was almost eighteen.) The school expelled him. 

Although he kept anticipating some kind of disgrace to emerge from this supposedly dire sequence of events, Raven found that being known to have been expelled from school on account of a homosexual scandal never damaged his career in the slightest. Indeed, he later came to feel cheated of the disgrace he felt he had deserved. In 1946, he joined the Parachute Regiment and shipped out to India; he was commissioned in May 1947 and the regiment returned home soon afterwards. In 1948, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, the very place for a young man with his history and personal tastes. He soon found that he could do pretty much as he wished there, so long as no offence was caused the college porters and scouts. Not unpredictably, Raven, who had modelled his undergraduate mien on Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind, became a protégé of George ‘Dadie’ Rylands. Although by this time the homophobic anti-aesthete F.R. Leavis was beginning to wield influence at King’s, there remained a rear-guard of liberal dons, Rylands among them, who were trying to re-establish the pre-war, pre-austerity days of the late 1930s. E.M. Forster, who had been back at King’s since 1946, was no flamboyant; but he was, of course, on the side of the angels. It was through him that Raven met J.R. Ackerley, who in 1951 started using him as a reviewer for the Listener. (Raven always wanted more out of Forster than he got. He later said of him, ‘Morgan Forster was a mean old number who never bought anyone dinner in his life’.) Raven was much liked around the place, but tended to be contrasted, to his detriment, with earlier figures to whose reputations he never had any intention of trying to live up. In his own recollection, people used to keep saying to him:

Why can’t you be more like Ant Blunt? He had a lot of fun like you, but he worked hard, he behaved nicely, he was a good socialist—you’re not, you’re just a beastly reactionary. Be more like Blunt.

 
Needless to say, Raven would extract every last ounce of pleasure from reminding those of them who were still alive of this when the good socialist was unmasked as the ‘fourth man’. A crucial difference between Raven and the favoured undergraduate type was, of course, that he had not come up straight from school. He had been an army officer and, reactionary though he undoubtedly was in many of his outspoken attitudes, his attitude to patriotism had always been coloured by a juxtaposition he observed, while still a schoolboy, at the beginning of the war:

The day I first understood what it was to love one’s country was when I saw, in a daily paper, a list of the probable runners at Newmarket adjacent to an account of a hideous defeat.

This is not an ironic observation. He speaks as a soldier, though not one who saw action in the war, and as an addict of the turf. To him, the juxtaposition did not mean that race-goers were, so to speak, dancing on the graves of the defenders of their liberty. On the contrary: he meant that the continuation of the Newmarket routine was precisely what the fighting men were dying for. By choice he would have gone to Newmarket, by duty to the battlefield.

Raven’s sex life was both varied and, if need be, mercenary. According to his biographer, ‘if he thought it was in his interests to sleep with someone old enough to be his father, e.g. a celebrity like John Sparrow, he would generally do so’. By now he was sleeping with women as well as men. As he said to Hilly, Kingsley Amis’ first wife, ‘Well, dear, when I’m with a chap it’s his willy, and when I’m with a lady, it’s mine. D’you see?’ (Whether there was anything more than a single ‘willy’ involved in each bout is not clear.) One of his girlfriends became pregnant in 1951. After failing to organise an abortion, they got married on 15 October; but he refused to live with her, and they went back to their separate lives. With mounting debts, uninterested in the research he was supposed to be doing at King’s, and finding that his income from reviewing was insufficient to live on, he decided to go back into the army. He joined the King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry in May 1953. Two years later, he went out to Kenya with the regiment. Among his more obvious achievements there was the setting-up of a rudimentary brothel for his men. He, meanwhile, had an affair with a young private—‘a bit of a misfit’, as he called the boy, ‘but attractive in a butch sort of way’. When Raven returned to England, to the Training Battalion at Depot, he set about ensuring that the chefs, the Mess waiters (always chosen for their looks) and the best sportsmen were never sent out to Kenya. When his army career did come to its premature end, the crisis was precipitated not by sexual scandal but by debt, and he was allowed to resign before the regiment get around to cashiering him.

Between April and June 1958, Raven wrote his first novel, The Feathers of Death, while staying at his parents’ house; by October he was working on his second.  On 25 January 1959, the publisher Anthony Blond, himself homosexual, invited ‘every homosexual bookseller in the country’ to celebrate publication of The Feathers of Death. Knowing he had happened on a hot property, Blond paid Raven a retainer but forced him to get away form the attractions and distractions of London.  So Raven moved to Deal, in Kent, where his younger brother Myles taught in a prep school. (Poor Myles was homosexual but only once tried to act on it: he put his hand on a boy’s knee. When the boy coolly responded ‘And what does Mr Raven want?’ he retreated—forever.)  In 1960 he published an essay on ‘The Male Prostitute in London’ in Encounter; it was said to have been ‘well received on the Stock Exchange’. In 1962, Raven conceived of the Alms for Oblivion series. And although he never possessed a television set himself, Raven did become a successful writer for television. His main achievement in this field was the 26-part adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, which the BBC transmitted in 1974. In 1971, Raven travelled to Australia on a cricket fans’ package tour to watch the Ashes campaign. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Patrick White, who cooked him dinner.  It was apparently a long evening, at which the group of diners became increasingly drunk and quarrelsome.

For a long time, Raven worshipped Anthony Blond’s younger lover Andrew McCall—who had published a spirited and racy novel called The Au-Pair Boy in 1970—and when Blond and McCall separated, McCall moved to live near Raven, who was then grieving over the loss of his brother. (Myles had died at the age of forty-five.) The enjoyed a close relationship but only rarely stayed together under the same roof. One such occasion was a stay at Tony Richardson’s villa in the south of France. They continued to see each other, in one way or another, until 1984.

Main source: Michael Barber, The Captain: The Life and Times of Simon Raven (London: Duckbacks, 2001). See also Simon Raven, The English Gentleman: An Essay in Attitudes (London: Blond, 1961), pp.112, 115.

Sibilla Aleramo

SIBILLA ALERAMO (1876-1960)

Sibilla Aleramo gives a fictionalised account of her own experience of marriage in A Woman (Una Donna, 1906), that dry, severe novel in which none of the characters are named and anything that can go wrong does.  Newly married to a man who first staked his physical claim by raping her, the book’s protagonist finds she has achieved the one respectable role available to a middle-class woman: ‘My new flannel dresses constantly reminded me that I really was a married woman, a serious person, whose place in life was irrevocably fixed’.  Identified by her clothing, she is, however, dressed as other women in her situation are dressed and her identity is, in effect, indistinguishable from theirs.  In becoming a ‘married woman’, rather than an unmarried girl, she has suffered a physical redefinition at the hands of her husband; but their honeymoon offered her no awakening: ‘There had been no emotional satisfaction or sensual arousal.  Oh, the expectations of a young girl!  I hadn’t had sufficient time before I was married to construct a complete world of rapture out of my dreams but my disappointment was as bitter as if I had’.  On this discovery of the fact that there is ‘no more mystery’ to her physical existence, she despondently hands her body over to her husband: ‘I was taken over by a sort of lethargy.  I seemed to need to do nothing except abandon myself completely to my new surroundings.  As a result my body submitted to my husband’s wishes although I found him physically more and more repugnant’.  Even motherhood, which briefly promises some kind of bodily fulfillment—until she has to farm out her son to a succession of peasant wet-nurses—proves unsuited to the complexity of her needs: ‘That rosy, breathing infant gave me pleasures and anxieties which were essentially uncomplicated, but which seemed constantly at odds with a sense of instability, a strange oscillation between lethargy and excitement, desire and indifference’.

Stability, of course, is the ideal quality in a middle-class wife.  It is her duty to maintain not only, with the help of servants, the fabric of the marital home but also the emotional balance of the family—regardless of a husband’s irrational mood-swings.  The problem with this protagonist is that she is too intelligent to carry out such tasks without questioning them.  Looking around at the limited social group to which she is expected to restrict herself, she sees only the falsity of social roles: ‘Was there anyone who dared to tell the truth and live their lives accordingly?  I felt sorry for this so-called life.  Everyone was so anxious to preserve it, even when it was gloomy and petty, that everyone capitulated’.  She is helped to see beyond to the lies that stabilise this society by reading two sorts of books, sociological and feminist.  The former confirm her intuitions of economic unfairness, while the latter introduce her to the full implications of a term she first heard when she was a girl: ‘emancipation’.  In the books she reads by feminist women from Britain and Scandinavia, far from seeming abstract, emancipation is embodied in an image of struggling women: ‘I felt irresistibly drawn to these exasperated women who protested in the name of all their sex, often at the cost of suppressing their deepest needs for love, beauty and motherhood’.  Given the nature of her physical enslavement to the head of her household, she especially admires those women who have cut themselves free of men by sacrificing their own right to physical pleasure.  Since sexual relations with her husband give her no pleasure at all, she is be able to identify herself with them: ‘whenever in my reading or daydreams I encountered women, historical or contemporary, who had chosen celibacy, I saluted their splendid iciness, feeling myself to be one of them, their sister’.

As it happened in Aleramo’s life, but not in the novel, she found a warmer alternative to celibacy, both in the arms of other women—including, in 1908, Lina Poletti who, in 1909, would have an affair with the actress Eleonora Duse—but also with more accommodating men than her husband had ever been.  Her most passionate relationship with a man would be in 1916 and 1917 with the poet Dino Campana (1885-1932), who was also a lover of men.  Like Aleramo herself, the protagonist of A Woman is an autodidact who uses education to turn herself into a writer and thereby liberate herself from her marriage.  But she does so at high cost: she has to leave her son behind.  He literally belongs, as she did, to his father.  Released into a community of feminist women and the broader community of socially concerned Italian intellectuals, but cut off from her son, she writes him a book.  Whether A Woman could ever be accepted by him as a generous gift is open to question—among Italians, motherhood is generally expected to be a good deal warmer in tone—but it is certainly a rigorous bequest to subsequent generations of Italian women.  Indeed, widely translated almost at once, it reached women readers around the world, even if it is now rather forgotten. 

Source: Sibilla Aleramo, A Woman (London: Virago, 1979), pp.35-36, 37, 53, 90, 91, 94.

Thornton Wilder

THORNTON WILDER (1897-1975): A Note

Throughout his career Thornton Wilder had ample opportunity, in such novels as The Cabala (1926) and Theophilus North (1973), to portray homosexual characters without giving himself away, but he seems continually to have sidestepped it.  Both of these novels are brimming with people who think and behave in eccentric and non-conformist ways.  Many of them are rich enough for the disapproval of others not to make any difference.  Even if they inhabit milieux in which marriage is expected of the respectable, few of the marriages portrayed are actually as stable or respectable as they have to seem.  The absence of any sign of even bisexual desires, let alone homosexual actions or relationships, itself comes to seem perverse.  Wilder’s cumulative silences on this theme are thunderous.  While even the most fearful gay authors have managed by sleight-of-hand to indulge their interest in people like themselves, Wilder, in contrast, seems to be acting not in fear but with a deliberate and proud refusal to be forced to write about a topic he chooses to ignore.  In certain moods it is possible to respect him for it.

Bill Tilden

The name Bill Tilden does not mean much to many these days.  But ‘Big’ Bill—he was six foot one-and-a-half inches tall—won Wimbledon twice, in 1920 and 1930 (the latter when he was thirty-seven), and he was described by René Lacoste as ‘the greatest player of all time’.  He was a close friend of Charlie Chaplin’s, and once starred in a silent movie, Hands of Hope (1924), which he had written and produced himself.  One summer in Hollywood, Clifton Webb hired him to give tennis lessons to some of Webb’s favourite actresses, including Greta Garbo.  He published tennis stories and even, in 1930, a tennis novel, Glory’s Net. 

            Tilden was not a particularly clubbable presence on the tennis circuit.  In the locker room he was obsessively private, never allowing himself to be seen naked, even by men who knew him all his life.  Outside the locker room he preferred the company of ball-boys to that of his fellow competitors.  He agreed to take part in a tournament in Baltimore only if he could throw a dinner party for some of his young friends.  These turned out to be the majority of the page-boys staffing the US Senate.  While it is true that he mixed with celebrities—in London with Tallulah Bankhead and Beatrice Lillie, for instance—he was generally uneasy in the presence of adults.  His nephew defined the attitude: ‘Uncle Bill was always glad to see you, but at the same time, you knew he would be gladder still when you left’.  At first, there was no evidence that he tried to seduce his tennis protégés, even if, as his biographer puts it, they ‘tended to be cute little devils, and … Big Bill always seemed to have his arms around them’.  However, once he had turned professional in 1931 and begun a hectic schedule of international touring, he appears to have started taking more risks.  He would always travel with a teenage boy, ostensibly a ball-boy, usually German.  (He had first played in Germany in 1927, and loved it there.  Even as late as 1938 he called himself ‘the most ardent admirer of the German people’ and said he would ‘rather play in Berlin than any city in the world’.)  Some cities he visited could not be returned to: in his biographer’s not very forthcoming words, ‘some unfortunate incidents were hushed up on the road, some polite warnings given’.  Presumably, the same was true not only of cities but also of people’s homes.  He was probably never invited back to Errol Flynn’s place after being accused of assaulting a seventeen-year-old guest at a tennis party Flynn held in 1943 (pp.51, 50, 159, 171).

            Tilden did not seek anything so complex as sexual mutuality with his boys.  He would masturbate them but not himself—again, his obsessive sense of privacy prevailed, and he would only masturbate himself later, when alone.  After his eventual arrest, the court psychiatrist who asked if he had ever engaged in ‘fellatio’ or ‘pederasty’ (anal intercourse) received a furious response.  Tilden regarded such activities as ‘perverted’; indeed, he was not even known to associate his own activities with ‘homosexuality’, a word which no one could remember his ever having used.  Yet, notwithstanding the rudimentary nature of his sexual contacts with the boys he befriended, if we are to believe a young tennis pro he spoke to in the late 1930s, he claimed to have rather unconvincingly grand aims.  ‘Those of us who have my way of thinking’, he supposedly said, ‘well, we look upon ourselves as the chosen few … I think it’s my responsibility to convert young boys.  God has smiled upon us’ (pp.212, 208).

            God was not smiling on Big Bill at ten in the evening on 23 November 1946, when two police officers flagged down an automobile that was being driven erratically along Sunset Boulevard.  In the driving seat was a fourteen-year-old boy called Bobby.  In the passenger seat was Bill Tilden, with his left arm around Bobby’s shoulders and his right hand inside Bobby’s flies.  Expecting probation, Tilden was horrified when, on 16 January 1947, he was sentenced to a year behind bars.  Having served eleven and a half months he was released on 30 August 1947, but banned from any further association with juveniles.  So another custodial sentence followed when, on 28 January 1949, he was accused of interfering with a sixteen-year-old hitchhiker called Michael.  Sentenced to another year, Tilden served ten months, from 10 February to 18 December 1949.  By now he was almost fifty-seven and barely capable of earning a living.  He more or less gave up washing, always wore the same clothes, and gradually pawned his old tennis trophies to pay his rent.  He died of a heart attack, aged sixty, on 5 June 1953.

Source: Frank Deford, Big Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy (London: Gollancz, 1977)