Auden's Platonic Blow

“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Poem” as it has also been called) is the best-known and most substantial of a small number of erotic poems Auden wrote, not for publication but for the private amusement of close friends.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, The Platonic Blow. 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 Yale University, with whom he was about to co-edit 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.

After the poem had been published, against his will, by the arts magazine Fuck You, in New York in 1965, Auden complained to Monroe Spears: “in depressed moods I feel it is the only poem by me which the Hippies have read” (18 November 1967). It was also published by a magazine more appropriately called Suck. Among friends, Auden openly acknowledged authorship of it. The British politician Tom Driberg recalled an occasion when, visiting the poet for lunch in New York, he was given a privileged reading. Auden also read part of it from a hot tub at a spa on Ischia to the visiting German student Peter Adam, later a distinguished broadcaster. Auden even, once, admitted to the mainstream press that the poem was his (Daily Telegraph Magazine, 9 August 1968). However, when Avant-Garde 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.

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 Taliessin through Logres (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.

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.

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.

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!  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.

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.

Auden, W.H., ‘The Platonic Blow’, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts 1 (March 1965)

Auden, W.H., ‘The Gobble Poem’, Suck: The First European Sex Paper 1 (October 1969)

Auden, W.H., ‘A Day for a Lay’, Avant Garde 11 (March 1970)

Auden, W.H., Collected Poems, London: Faber, 1976

Carpenter, Humphrey, W.H. Auden: A Biography, London: Allen & Unwin, 1981

Norse, Harold, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, London: Bloomsbury, 1990

Woods, Gregory, ‘W.H. Auden’, Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry, New Haven & London: Yale, 1987

Chaimowicz on Jean Genet

[I was asked to write this for the website of Nottingham Contemporary, but as far as I know it was never published there.]

When I conducted a walk-through tour of Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s exhibition Jean Genet, Act 1, I did so from a position of astonished disappointment. For me, Jean Genet was the great queer writer of the Twentieth Century—making no compromise with either public taste or with the self-consciously ‘respectable’ subculture of a gay minority. I had been reading his novels since my late teens, thrilled by their rudeness, the power of their prose (even in translation), their celebration not of gay identity but of the sexiness of masculinity, their Chinese boxes of infinitely promising transgressions…

For sure, I felt, any exhibition based on the work of this man was going to frighten the horses. In the event, this one did carry a warning. Nottingham Contemporary had made a little notice saying:

WARNING

Visitors passing beyond this notice will find material on display, which they may consider indecent. No admittance to people under 18 years old.

Sad to say, this was not at the main entrance to the gallery but guarded its innermost sanctum, the little windowless room off the study room at the back. On one wall there was a photograph of a naked young man with an erection. The drawers in the Cabinet of Curiosities also had some interesting photographs of tattooed Russian prisoners. A separate cabinet of objects extracted from the bodies of prisoners was rather coyly labelled as if they had all been swallowed, when it was quite clear that many of them were more likely to have been rectally smuggled.

            However, apart from some resonant photographs of the male body by Wolfgang Tilmans, the main body of the exhibition had more or less ignored the scandalous Genet. When Chaimowicz appeared at Nottingham Contemporary in person, I asked about the apparent erasure of male-male desire from his exhibition. Both he and his interlocutor Michael Bracewell seemed surprised I had raised the issue at all. They went on the defensive. Instead of just saying, ‘This is a personal show and that isn’t the aspect of Genet that interested me’, Chaimowicz said ‘I don’t think Genet would have been happy to be ghettoized.’ Well no, but nor would he have wanted to be sanitised. (I have spent all my working life fighting against this pernicious idea that the expression of same-sex desire must have the effect of diminishing any artist.)

So in my tour I tried to redress the balance. I asked that my audience be warned about ‘adult’ content, and that parents with children be steered away from us. But it was never going to be that easy. A Wednesday afternoon is not the best time to present ‘adult’ material in a free-access space. By the time we came we came to the last room, my impression was that there were children running about all over the place. But, as years of working in gay studies have taught me, despite constant pressures to censure oneself, there is always much that can be said.

Beginning the tour, I knelt on a pre-dieu to acknowledge Genet’s adversarial relationship with Roman Catholic culture and  read out my own poem ‘Jean Genet in Norwich’, in which the writer goes cottaging in that most genteel of English cities. Beside an executioner’s bell which Chaimowicz had borrowed from Nottingham’s Galleries of Justice, I read from Genet’s love elegy to a condemned man (just one of his many expressions of desire for murderers) and in front of Wolfgang Tilmans’ photograph ‘Anders Behind Leaves’ I described a passage from Genet’s novel Querelle of Brest in which, during a sexual act, Lieutenant Seblon is sacramentally humiliated by becoming smeared with excrement.

            In Jean Genet, Act 2, by various artists, among exhibits referencing the Maghreb and Palestine, I talked about famous occasions when Genet deliberately compromised his anti-imperialist politics with lusty expressions of desire for the uniformed men who police empires.

            Although I had to hold back from actually quoting some of Genet’s more forthright expressions, by the time we had made our circuit of the exhibition spaces I felt I had, at least, brought to a somewhat emasculated exhibition a whiff of Jean Genet’s rampant eros.

Virtuous Vice

An old book review that still seems very relevant:

Eric O. Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Durham, North Caroline: Duke University Press, 2000)

The truth most universally acknowledged by gay liberationists ever since the Stonewall riots in 1969 is that gay liberation depends on the abolition of secrecy.  The more we say we are gay, the more our rights will have to be taken into account.  The less rare we seem, the less shall we lay ourselves open to exploitation and abuse.  Let us invade and settle any social space but one: that which we have abjured for ever, the closet.  We arrived at a firm consensus that it was an absolute social duty, as far as each individual was able, to come out—to oneself, to one’s family, to one’s friends, in the workplace, and to the world at large.  Visibility at any cost.

Ever since, we have been trying to find a suitable alternative space for ourselves.  If not the closet, where else?  The fact is, if you take provincial towns in Britain as an example, the gay ‘scene’ has hardly changed in its essentials since before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.  Beyond a handful of pubs and nightclubs, the latter often run by low-level mafiosi, in each town, there is virtually nothing else.  So what kind of cultural space do gay people aspire to as they look forward into the new century?  The commonest answer appears to be: as far as possible, the suburban dream home of the 1950s—the very place which, since that benighted decade, we have consistently regarded as most alien to us because most dangerous for us.

The new homosexual is expected to form lasting relationships secured by legal ties; to want to have children, if not quite yet to be allowed to; to participate normally—that is, discreetly—in local institutions like the church choir and the PTA (but without laying hands or even equivocal words on the choristers or pupils).  Like the token gays in a contemporary TV soap, the new homosexual will socialise heterosexually, but only at a certain distance lest, by design or accident, they tempt hetero spouses from out of the definitive security of their marriages.  Lesbians and gay men will bring to the burbs their own special magic, amusingly helping out with tasks inappropriate to their gender: gay men arranging the flowers on the altar, lesbians doing the carpentry for the school pageant.  They will serve in the national institutions, and their patriotism will never be questioned—unless they start to form exclusive cliques or cells.  Eventually, like long-term immigrants, ‘they’ will become so like ‘us’ that we will be able to overlook the fact that they are them.  With watchful policing, perfect assimilation will have been achieved.

            This dream scenario is also, of course, a nightmare; and a paradoxical one, at that.  The logical consequence of this long process of coming out of the closet and then assimilating into hetero-bourgeois society is the re-entry of the closet all over again.  The aim is to become indistinguishable from anyone else—and on their terms, by following their model—which is precisely the effect of being closeted.

In his timely and lucid monograph Virtuous Vice, Eric Clarke subjects the goals of American lesbian and gay identity politics to sceptical examination. An increasingly respectable minority, still taking for granted the two cornerstone imperatives of 1970s gay liberationism—coming out and positive images—is seeking to assimilate itself into the mainstream, firstly, by making itself more visible and, secondly, by then being seen to consist of good citizens only. To accomplish this remarkable social transformation, as if swapping with each other, gay men have donned suits and ties, lesbians skirts and lipstick. More tellingly, they have systematically distanced themselves from the old stereotypes by distancing themselves also from fellow gay men and lesbians who are promiscuous, exhibitionistic, effeminate/butch, sadomasochistic, paedophile, fetishist, or otherwise conceivably anti-social. Imagine how concerned they would have been to hide that dirty old boy-chaser Walt Whitman, even though they still claim to value his poetry. Good gay citizens will prove the virtuousness of their vice by demanding that the authorities approve their long-term relationships and by joining up with the institutions of state--the military, for instance--without being tempted to spy for the enemy. You could be forgiven for thinking that all gay liberation amounts to is being given permission to marry your sergeant major.

Clarke takes celebrities who have come out as the main examples of the new visibility. He concentrates on Ellen Degeneres—perhaps a little unfairly when you consider how her career has suffered as a consequence.  Such figures, he claims, ‘have publicly argued that queer erotic diversity should be restricted to already valorized, heteronormative forms of erotic attachment and expression’.  Ellen’s coming out was widely welcomed in lesbian and gay circles.  But what happens when such a celebrity, willingly playing the role of role model, explicitly distances herself from ‘dykes on bikes or these men dressed as women’?  (She means motorbikes, not pushbikes, and men who live in drag, not entertainers.)

How can—if it can—the private vice of homo-eroticism, when outed into Habermas’ category of ‘the public sphere’, become valued as a public virtue?  Just how far have those who govern us really moved on from Kant’s notion that only in monogamous marital relations between a property-owning man and a woman can the objectifying and animalistic tendencies of sexual desire be, if not eliminated, at least minimised?  Clarke shows how far, in the USA, ‘moral conformity’ has become ‘the very precondition for enfranchisement’.  The normalisation of homosexuality proceeds apace.  Why, it looks as if it may soon be necessary, when coming out as gay, to add: ‘But I don’t sleep around, I don’t wear women’s clothes, I’m not into s/m and I won’t fuck your child’.  This drive for ‘moral enfranchisement’ also helps to explain the type of rights which are currently being demanded: ‘the right to marry, serve openly in the armed forces, parent, dispense with private property as one pleases’ and so on.  Of these, marriage has become the most important, to the extent that ‘marriage becomes one of the only rights deemed worth having, and conversely only those who desire to marry are deemed worthy of rights’ (Clarke’s emphasis).

            If it is true, as Clarke claims, that we have invested the whole of our social development in the commercialisation of our marginalised sexualities (‘Post-Stonewall urban gay men reek of the commodity.  We give off the smell of capitalism in rut’), what is to be gained thereby?  To what extent must the broader objectives of gay liberation be compromised by the more immediate desire to be catered for when shopping?  Clarke takes the sceptical line, arguing that ‘visibility politics mistakes commercial publicity as a democratically authentic representation of persons and groups’.

Clarke is meticulous and wide-ranging in his historical contextualisation of the problem.  There is an extremely useful sequence on how, during the Westernisation of Greece in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, supposedly ‘oriental’ customs returned to Europe, via a war zone reconstituted as the ‘cradle’ of ‘civilisation’.  And he gives a cogent account of the changing reputation of Percy Shelley’s personality, which was first characterised as consisting of an androgynous manliness, almost Christ-like in its purity, but eventually, after his death, came to be mistrusted as exhibiting signs of perverse effeminacy and degeneracy.

My reservations are few but perhaps not insignificant.  Clarke’s argument is entirely based on the narrowly American struggle for marriage rights and access to careers in the military.  Although these issues have arisen in Europe, they are regarded here as far less central to the gay liberationist struggle in societies which are less conformist than the Land of the Free.  Certainly, in Britain the armed services do not any longer have the social status that they still have in the USA; and in Britain not only do gay people seem to have recognised that marriage simply does not work for heterosexuals—to be truly normative, any provision for queer marriage would have to include provision for queer divorce—but our politics are still far less in thrall to the rhetoric of Christianity than the Americans’.  Moreover, in many (especially non-western) cultures the pertinent ethical question is much closer to being: should queer citizens, once identified, be allowed freedom of movement or action at all?  Or should they even be allowed to live?  This question, never addressed by Clarke, is still not wholly irrelevant even in the nation to which the gay student Matthew Shepard belonged.  (He was crucified by homophobes in Wyoming, the Equality State, in October 1997, and left to die.)

Clarke directs an appropriate but superficial glance at the lesbian and gay travel/holiday industry.  The matter is more complicated than he seems to notice.  He does not mention that many, if not most, American gay tourism advertisements are not about being out and about in the ‘public sphere’ at all, but about walled vacation ‘resorts’ (which in other parts of the world would be called ‘compounds’) in places like Palm Springs and Key West and specially chartered, heterosexual-excluding cruise liners.  When this aspect of gay privacy intrudes on the public sphere of the outside world, major problems can arise—as in April 1998 when the SS Seabreeze I was met by 300 local protestors as it debouched its complement of lesbians into the streets of Nassau in the Bahamas.  In January of the same year a Norwegian Cruise Lines boat-load of gay men had actually been turned away from the Cayman Islands.  Indeed, contrary to expectation, it may prove, in the long run, less difficult for us to come out in our predominantly urban workplaces than in the non-metropolitan and non-Western places to which we aspire to travel in our vacations.

It is odd that Clarke makes no mention of the Internet, where not only are the traditional parameters of private and public being systematically redefined (cyberspace being, strictly speaking, neither one thing nor the other), but so too, in many ways, are sexual identities.  MOOing and MUDDing in the realms of virtuality beyond the phenomenological confines of physique, it is certainly true that some people believe they are developing new configurations of gendered, or even ungendered, interaction and new ways of existing queerly.  Under the circumstances, it appears that we need to develop a more sophisticated sense not only of the public but of the private sphere—for which the gay-moralised concept of ‘the closet’ may not be the only conceivable metaphor.

A couple of problems which arise in Virtuous Vice are common to a lot of recent work in queer studies.  Clarke sometimes appears to want to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to matters of language.  Queer theorists have replaced the anachronistic use of ‘homosexual’ with the safer—because far more ambiguous—term ‘queer’.  Needless to say, this is no less anachronistic.  So, for instance, Clarke refers to Percy Shelley’s ‘queer peculiarities’ (p.155), where the adjective is redundant unless it carries the burden of a late-twentieth-century sexual meaning.  And when quoting an anonymous reviewer’s comment that at school Shelley refused to participate in the fagging system—‘he would not be a fag’—Clarke does not gloss what is, after all, an extremely narrow usage of ‘fag’ for his American readers.  It is clear that he wants it to carry the twentieth-century resonance of faggotry.

Clarke seems to be embarrassed by his own scholarship.  It is as if he knows—even if he does not admit it—that education is itself the most assimilationist project of all.  There is an uncomfortably revealing moment when he says, ‘As odd and nerdy as it may sound, I often think of Habermas when teaching alternative AIDS videos to my [sic] undergraduates in an Introduction to Popular Culture course.’  This makes me worry about what his teaching is like when he is not being odd and nerdy.  What on earth is the point of reading Habermas at all (or whoever else) if his work is not going to come to mind when we are thinking about relevant topics?  The very next sentence is startling in its curmudgeonly recognition that Clarke’s own career is not a completely lost cause: ‘Despite the inequities of power between teachers and students, the classroom at times can be an ideal arena for the exchange of ideas.’  It can, indeed.

Clarke’s assault on assimilationism raises all kinds of anxieties when one considers that it comes from a university professor: for the fact is that queer academics are themselves (ourselves, rather) a highly specialist academic élite whose goal has been, over the last decade, to settle a niche in some of the most conservative institutions in the West: the universities and their adjunct publishing houses.  Nobody who is, or aims to be, a professor working in queer studies should ever look down on a pair of gay men who want to get married or a lesbian who wants to join the navy. Besides, I am not convinced that the kinds of political and cultural strategy that Clarke labels as assimilationist all are, or always are.

For instance, to say that claiming to be part of a gay tradition is an assimilationist move tells us little. What matters is: assimilation into what, by whom, and to what end? There is surely a difference between claimants. Alexander the Great and Hephaestion dancing naked on the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus at Troy; Oscar Wilde, facing hard labour, identifying with Plato; a pre-operative transsexual reading up on the Native American berdache; an isolated moffie in South Africa looking to the Western gay movements for inspiration, if not a precise blueprint; a man with AIDS reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain; a guilt-ridden Christian sodomite, citing David and Jonathan or Naomi and Ruth rather than the cities of the plain... Thus implicitly to claim solidarity with known figures from the past, actual or invented, is an assertion of knowledge and not—contrary to the more heavy-handed queer theorists—a demonstration of ignorance. One of the major uses to which culture can be put is to give us a sense of, in Van Wyck Brooks’ expression, ‘a usable past’. To identify with pre-‘homosexual’ formulations of same-sex sexuality, or with other cultures’ formulations, may indeed be one of our best ways of not assimilating into the dominant American capitalist-commercial mode.

[This review was first published in Textual Practice 15, 2 (Summer 2001), pp.340-344.]

Lord Baden-Powell

 

Rumours about Baden-Powell’s homosexuality chiefly concern his relationship with Kenneth McLaren, whom he met in 1881 when McLaren was twenty but looked like ‘a lad of apparently about fourteen’.  (Baden-Powell was 24 at the time.)  McLaren certainly became his closest friend, whom he gave the affectionate nickname of ‘Boy’ or ‘the Boy’, but there is no evidence either way, that this was or was not a sexual relationship.  They did love each other, if that counts.  Baden-Powell’s biographer says of him that ‘The available evidence points inexorably to the conclusion that Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual’ – which presumably means that in an ideal world (for him) he would have had sexual relationships with other males, but that in sadder reality he did not.[1]

There can be no doubt that Baden-Powell was far more interested in men and boys, as comrades, colleagues and companions, than in women and girls.  He took it for granted – and publicly said so – that a male couple could make just as happy a life for themselves in living together as any husband and wife; this view always tempered his otherwise wholly conventional and conservative attitudes to marriage as an institution.  But his commitment to the masculine principle went further than that.  In the face of his typical utterances about men, mere woman pales to insignificance.  In Rovering to Success (1922), for instance, he roundly declares that ‘A clean young man in his prime of health and strength is the finest creature God has made in this world’.[2]  He liked to watch his boy scouts bathing naked, and was horrified in 1934 when the police decided to crack down on boys’ naked bathing in the Serpentine.  A friend of his, A.H. Tod, a master at Charterhouse (of which Baden-Powell was an old boy), amassed a large collection of photographs he had taken of Charterhouse boys in the nude; Baden-Powell was delighted when invited to look through these.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in their cumulative splendour, they represented the crucial essence of the task to which he had dedicated his life.  For him, mens sana in corpore sano was more than just a pious phrase.  He applied it, actively and practically, in his concentration on the instilling of regular and assiduous bathing habits in boy scouts, as well as on the design of their uniforms.  (Shorts were connected, in his mind, with both freedom of movement and bodily hygiene; he also found them attractive.)  A boy with clean habits was likely to be pure in mind, too; which made him worth befriending.  A boy who was dirty, and dirty-minded either as cause or in consequence, was all the more worth befriending – so that he could be educated into better habits.  It stood to reason.

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[1] Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell (London: Hutchinson, 1989), p ?

[2] Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell, Rovering to Success: A Book of Life-Sport for Young Men (London: Herbert Jenkins, [1930]), p.119.

Violet Gordon Woodhouse

Late in the summer of 1894, Rupert Gwynne and Gordon Woodhouse, having both just left Cambridge, held a party at the home of the latter’s parents, at which Woodhouse met Gwynne’s twenty-three-year-old sister, Violet.  Within weeks, Gordon and Violet were engaged.  Her intention was that the marriage should be platonic.  (In any case, the family later intimated that Gordon had had a hunting accident that left him sexually incapable.)  They were married on 30 July 1895; Rupert Gwynne was Gordon Woodhouse’s best man.  The bride immediately took charge of the relationship by way of the question of names.  On their honeymoon, she signed her maiden name in the hotel register at Scheveningen.  Yet when they returned to England she persuaded her husband to change his name, by deed poll, to Gordon Gordon-Woodhouse, so that she could call herself Violet Gordon Woodhouse, thereby using not just one but both of his names.

            Violet Gordon Woodhouse was an accomplished musician.  Ferrucio Busoni called her ‘one of the greatest living keyboard artists’.  She played the piano and the harpsichord at chamber concerts with the ‘early music’ pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch, and her own ‘at home’ concerts at 6 Upper Brook Street in London became fashionable.  Four years into the marriage, a relationship developed, with Gordon’s consent, between Violet and Gordon’s friend, the Hon. William Barrington, whom she had first met at that same house party in 1894 at which she had met Gordon himself.  There is some question as to whether even this new relationship with Bill Barrington was ever consummated.  As Violet’s biographer tentatively puts it, ‘it is not impossible ... that even at the height of their erotic passion her relationship with Bill was not fully consummated’.  In 1901, when Gordon and Violet moved into Southover Grange in Lewes, Bill moved in with them.[1]

            In the same year, this cosy domestic relationship was enlarged by one, when Max Labouchère (nephew of Henry Labouchère, he of the ‘Amendment’) joined them; and then by one more, when the Hon. Denis Tollemache, seventeen years old and just down from Winchester, also joined the fray.  Denis had loved Violet since, at the age of eight, he attended one of her musical recitals.  Gordon Woodhouse seemed perfectly happy to welcome the other three men into his marriage; and Bill Barrington, too, welcomed the two newcomers.  Violet’s biographer asks the necessary question with the necessary scepticism: ‘Could they conceivably be—inexpressible thought, only ten years after Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment—a nest of homosexuals?  Surely not’.[2]

            Violet’s brother Rupert got married in 1905.  His old friends Gordon and Bill were ushers at the wedding.  (There were seven Gwynne siblings, the youngest of whom, Roland, was certainly homosexual.)  Southover Grange was sold the following year, and Violet and three of her menfolk moved into Armscote House, near Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1907.  The fourth man, young Denis Tollemache, moved into the house next door.  (He also kept a home in London.)  The popular novelist Marie Corelli (1855-1924) lived nearby with her lifelong companion Bertha Vyver.  Violet Gordon Woodhouse had a number of prominent lesbian friends by now.  They included Christabel Marshall, secretary to Lady Randolph Churchill and her son Winston.  Marshall had fallen in love with the actress Ellen Terry’s daughter, Edith Craig, in 1899, and the two of them sustained a relationship for the next half a century.  The Princesse de Polignac, Winnaretta Singer, had recently been having an affair with the composer Ethel Smyth and was promoting her opera The Wreckers with a series of play-throughs in private houses.  Having heard the piece, Violet decided to help.  Although they had not met before, it was not long before a close friendship developed between Violet and the composer.  Smyth sealed it by giving Violet a copy of the life and poems of Sappho.  At a suffragist meeting held in London in 1910, she met Radclyffe Hall.  In 1915, Hall started visiting Violet and dedicated her collection The Forgotten Island to her.  They were close, but it is not likely that they were ever lovers.

            Denis, meanwhile, was taking part in the Battle of the Somme, and Bill was fighting in what is now Iraq before being posted to India.  In 1917 Denis was captured and imprisoned for the duration.  On 20 April 1918, Max Labouchère died on the line at the Somme.  Violet, who had been befriended by the Sitwells, found herself performing for other men who had been to Hell and back: Osbert Sitwell brought Robert Nichols, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Arthur Waley and others to hear her play.  In the post-war period she was paid further impressive homages.  In the summer of 1919, Serge Diaghilev brought Pablo Picasso to meet her.  T.E. Lawrence visited with Sir Ronald Storrs, and then on various occasions by himself.  Ethel Smyth brought her lover Edith Somerville.  It was Smyth who brought Violet and Virginia Woolf together—the Woolfs went to a private performance of Violet’s at her town house in Brompton Square in March 1931—but no friendship developed.

            When Violet died in January 1948, Bill Barrington was the principal mourner at her funeral, with Gordon Woodhouse following closely in his wake.  Bill and Gordon went on living together (Denis had died in 1942) for another three years.  Gordon died in 1951, Bill in 1960.

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[1]Jessica Douglas-Home, Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: Harvill, 1996), pp.74, 63.

[2]Douglas-Home, p.94.

Frank O'Hara

Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, Carcanet Press, 1991 (2005 reissue)

By the time of his death on Fire Island in 1966—run over by a beach buggy in the middle of the night—Frank O’Hara was a familiar figure in those circles where the New York art scene and the street-level gay subcultures overlapped.  Not only was he Associate Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, but he had established himself as an energetic presence on the vibrant poetry circuit of the day.  Fully immersed in the business of working out how to live and write in a new era as an openly gay man, he wrote about his own milieu in his own city: New York, the place he calls Sodom-on-Hudson (‘Commercial Variations’), where the very leaves fall from the trees ‘like angels who’ve been discharged for sodomy’ (‘Second Avenue’).

Hardly anywhere else interested him.  In ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ he distances himself from what was expected of a certain type of gay poet: ‘I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures.  No.  One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life’.  His work is so firmly based in the one place that he could be accused of parochialism, were it not for the fact that New York is such a special case as a world-wide exemplar of the modern urban experience.  In any case, his poetry is often very European in its influences: Rimbaud, for a start, as well as the full spectrum of European modernist painters.

O’Hara’s roommate and sometime lover Joe LeSueur later said of him: ‘there were times when I thought he was in love with at least half of his friends, for it was possible for him to get so emotionally involved that it wasn’t unusual for him to end up in bed with one of them and then, with no apparent difficulty, to go right back to being friends again afterward … He didn’t make distinctions, he mixed everything up: life and art, friends and lovers—what was the difference between them?’  What O’Hara particularly valued was a queerness that overlapped with everything else: work and leisure, high art and low life, sadness and hilarity, sex and friendship, masculinity and femininity, straightness and bentness.

Because he loathed the idea that he should ever have to close himself off from any aspect of life, he refused to mix in closed gay circles and snobby elites.  Joe Le Sueur later wrote: ‘if he was going to be adamantly opposed to the gay ghetto principle as exemplified by Cherry Grove on Fire Island, Lenny’s Hideaway downtown, the Bird Circuit uptown, any gay gathering where straights were excluded or not wanted—in other words, a way of life that promoted compulsive cruising, misogyny, and homosexual separatism—he must have felt it necessary, as a point of pride and as a moral obligation, to hammer home to straight people the clear, unmistakable message that he was an uncontrite, arrogant queer who was not about to sing miserere or fall on his knees to anyone.’   Or if he were to fall to his knees, he would do so only for an angelic physique.

O’Hara is that miraculous creature, a poet who is actually enjoying his life.  The tone of his work is so optimistic that even when he says ‘All I want is boundless love’ (‘Meditations in an Emergency’) it is as if he is not asking for much.  His mood is infectious.  When he ends one of his poems of street observations with the challenging question to the reader, ‘why are you reading this poem anyway?’ (‘Petit Poème en Prose’), the implication is that we might be better occupied walking the streets, creating the encounters out of which to make poems of our own.  Poetry must be based not in detached contemplation, but in active involvement and celebration: ‘What is the poet for, if not to scream / himself into a hernia of admiration for / paradoxical integuments’ (‘Ashes on Saturday Afternoon’).  His language is often subculturally specific—‘it’s the night like I love it all cruisy and nelly’ (‘Easter’)—as if he expects everyone, philiac and phobic alike, to take part in the gayness of his gaiety and the nelliness of his tears.  Joy and pain are opposite sides of the same vibrancy—unhappiness is a necessary corollary of happiness.  But his was not the ‘tragic’ happiness to which the Cold War American queer was said to be both prone and doomed.  The gay men he knew had ways of dealing with the standard heartbreak of living with love and hatred: ‘I don’t want any of you to be really unhappy, just camp it up a bit and whine, whineola, baby’.

Included in this volume is O’Hara’s light-hearted but serious manifesto of what he called ‘Personism’, whereby the poem speaks ‘between two persons instead of two pages’.  Only half joking when he says this method will prove ‘the death of literature as we know it’, he advocates a poetry that speaks directly to the reader as an individual rather than loftily down to a crowd.  He acknowledges—as so many poets do not, now as then—that there is more to life than verse, and more to verse than versification.  (His own preferred art forms were painting and cinema.  As he put it, ‘only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies’.)  While his poems can—and often strive to—seem casual, they also display a phenomenal mastery of open forms.  Of technique, he has this to say: ‘As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.  There’s nothing metaphysical about it.’

[This review first appeared on the Chroma blog.]

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