John Barton, HYMN

A review of John Barton, HYMN (London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2009)

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.

            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 ‘Hymn 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.

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, ‘Hymn 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

            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.

A Room in Chelsea Square

A Room in Chelsea Square 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.

            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'.

            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 sang froid. If hidden at all, they are, like Poe's purloined letter, hidden in plain sight.

            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.

            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.

            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.

            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 normals'. He is wrong about this: for, as far as we can tell, Nicholas is as much of an abnormal 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.

            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 A Room in Russell Square 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.

            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.

            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 Angry Young Man 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  crucible of artistic activity in London, a long way further down the social scale than the snobbish Patrick.

            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 protégés 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 protégé, presumably because of ongoing problems caused by British involvement in Cyprus.

            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 roman à clef, 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 New Writing (later to be reincarnated as Penguin New Writing). 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 Horizon. Patrick is based on Peter Watson (1908-1956), who had co-founded Horizon 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.)

            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: 'I 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.

            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.

[This essay was written to serve as the introduction to the new Valancourt Press edition (2013) of Michael Nelson's novel.]

The Radetzky March

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 The Radetzky March (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:

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.

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:

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 delight he raised his hand, his limp fingers capering in the air.

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:

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.

As the seductions begin, ‘Lieutenant Kindermann blanched. He was whiter than the powder on the girls’ shoulders’.

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.


[Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (London: Penguin, 2000), pp.68, 73-74, 75, 110.]

Miss Lonelyhearts

One among many grotesque incidents in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (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.

            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.

            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.

[Nathanael West, Miss Lonelihearts and A Cool Million (Harmondswoth: Penguin, 1961), pp.24-26.]

Anonymity

[This is an item I first published in Anon 2 (2004), pp.46-48.]

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.

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’.

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?

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 Practical Criticism (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.

Today, the poems submitted to this magazine, Anon, 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.

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.

Opportune Immunity

[This is the proposal for an essay I have been meaning to write, 'Opportune Immunity: AIDS and the American Canon'.]

There is no reference to AIDS in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (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.

           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.) [Larry Kramer, ‘The Sadness of Gore Vidal’, in Gore Vidal, Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1999), pp.255-256.]

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.

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, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Joseph Heller, Closing Time (1994), John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), Saul Bellow, The Actual (1997), Don Delillo, Underworld (1997), Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997), Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (1998), Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2000) and E.L. Doctorow, City of God (2000).

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 fin de siècle 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 Ravelstein, 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.

Other Avenues

An information pack entitled How to Get Your Poetry Published, circulated by the Poetry Society, contains the following gem of practical advice under the heading ‘Other Avenues’:

Alternative publishing.  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.

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. 

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, We Have the Melon (Carcanet, 1992), was reviewed in the February 1993 issue of Envoi 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’.

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.)

A recent review of Robert Hamberger’s latest book begins: ‘The Smug Bridegroom 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.

In a mad review of my last collection The District Commissioner’s Dreams (Carcanet, 2002) in the London Magazine, 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 Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary or Hedda Gabler 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.

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 How to Get Your Poetry Published—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.

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 Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (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 The Badboy Book of Erotic Poetry  (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 Gay Love Poetry (London: Robinson, 1997).  And in 1998 the literary executor refused Gillian Spraggs permission to publish work by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland in Love Shook My Senses: Lesbian Love Poems (London: Women’s Press, 1998).

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 Gay Times, 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’ (The Dark Horse, Winter 2001-2002).  As Susan Sontag once said to Edmund White, ‘Surely you don’t want to be just a gay writer.  Don’t you want to hit the big time?’

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 Moly (1971)—too much free verse, too many free attitudes—but also because he then became openly gay in Jack Straw’s Castle (1976) and The Passages of Joy (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 The Man with Night Sweats (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.

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.

How to Get Your Poetry Published 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 perversions (1994-1996) could have carried poetry but never did.  The European Gay Review (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 Capital Gay, but only because it was about an arson attack on the premises of Capital Gay itself.  Before that, the editors of the much-lamented Square Peg 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.

There has not been a consistently enthusiastic outlet for gay and lesbian verse in Britain since Gay News, 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 Gay News 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).

            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 Collected Poems were published this year by Carcanet Press.

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, Boss Cupid (2000), struck me as more impressive, even, than The Man with Night Sweats.  The whole book crackles with disturbing splicings of the erotic and the deadly.  Who could forget Gunn’s grim variation on the carpe diem 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’?

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, Queueing for the Sun (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.

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 The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (University of Texas Press, 1979) and my own Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (Yale, 1987).  However, the Australian academic Paul Knobel is now writing a history of gay poetry.  Until that is finished, we have his Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and Its Reception History (2002), a very wide-ranging CD-Rom (available from Homo Poetry, P.O. Box 672, Edgecliff, New South Wales, Australia 2027).

 [This essay was first published in Magma 27 (Autumn 2003), pp.22-26.]