QOTD (2012-02-24); or, The Days When I Love My Job 24 February 2012
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This last slog toward a finished thesis and a finished bachelor’s degree is proving much more arduous than I expected. Despite what a cushy life I lead, this year has not always been so happy, especially this winter. Sometimes it’s made me strongly doubt whether I really can sentence myself to a life sentence of reading and writing and be content with that.
But then I read beautiful things, and I am sincerely grateful that I get paid to be an intellectual and literary historian and that I am currently at an institution where the librarians will special-order recently-published and very expensive volumes for me, such as the new Philip Gardner-edited edition of E.M. Forster’s diaries and journals. My thesis ends with Forster, who is one of the most interesting twentieth-century readers of Symonds, and the following entry in Forster’s “Locked Diary” explains why. He wrote it on 10 January 1912, after a visit to Symonds’ old friend Graham Dakyns reminded him of Symonds himself:
J.A. Symonds. Feel nearer to him than any man I have read about — too near to be irritated by his flamboyance which I scarcely share. But education — (Classics, Renaissance, Eng. Lit.) — , health — (tendency to phthysis) — literary interest in philosophic questions, love of travel, inclination to be pleasant and above all, minorism. True, he married,but he had better not have. His contrary inclinations only dragged him asunder till the strongest triumphed. He was a brave & intelligible man, and I am proud to be in some ways so like him, & mean to think of him in difficulties, though having a weaker brain and a stronger sense of humour, I may get through life more easily. Such a fine passage — end of Vol I of his life — about never acting from moral reasons. What wouldn’t I give to read the Autobiography entire but Horatio Brown will never let me. ‘Rough handsome young man.’ It is odd. He has met Walt Whitman by now, if the dead are meetable, and has rebuked him for his hypocritical letter, & on that supposition I too shall meet them, and though Whitman will have most to say to me, I shall have most to say to Symonds. Samuel Butler would be nice for a little. Then there are the big people whom one feels one has to want to meet, like Keats and Petrarch and Michelangelo.
Reading that means something human. Accessing the universal through the particular. The promise that even three floors underground, elbow-deep in books at a little boxy desk, reading others’ commonplace books and filling in my own, the books and the world will, on the best of days, work together—and I will learn how to connect.
QOTD (2012-02-10) 10 February 2012
Posted by Emily in Blog, Oxford, Princeton, Thesis.add a comment
This afternoon found me in the Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, poring over some 1890s Oxford undergraduate periodicals that became rather notorious because they were edited by Alfred Douglas and were thus made much of in the Wilde trials. They were fabulous as a window into late-nineteenth-century student life, featuring everything from ads for High Street businesses to original verse in Greek and of course endless commentary on Summer Eights and bad attempts at humor about scouts. And, naturally, there’s quite a lot of homoeroticism of the neoclassical sort, including some poems by Symonds, Douglas, and Wilde. But this anonymous poem jumped out at me in a way the others didn’t—it seemed to me to be actually about the unique romanticism of Oxford, not the romanticism of other times and places:
Love in Oxford
When the shades of the twilight come
Hiding the face of the flow’rs,
My heart yearns blind and dumb
In a city of mist-girt tow’rs,
In a place of shadows and spires
The love of my heart goes forth
To the sea and the clear cold north,
To him whom my soul desires.The southern skies and the mist
Chill me and blind my sight.
I long for the lips I kiss’d,
And the eyes that were brave and bright;
I long for the touch of his hand,
And the sound of the voice I knew
When the breeze of the evening blew,
And the stars shone cold on the sand.Out of his northern home
I call him here to my side,
On his face is the salt sea-foam,
In his ears is the song of the tide;
He shall come with his soul aflame,
His voice shall be sweet and strong,
He shall sing me a golden song,
He shall rob me of fear and shame;
He shall steep my spirit in bliss,
He shall triumph and set me free,
For love is as deep as the sea,
And sweet as the core of a kiss.
Some Brief Thoughts on Love 29 January 2012
Posted by Emily in Blog, Ethics, LGBT, Thesis.add a comment
Between writing the chapter of my thesis on Symonds’ late work, and getting really seriously into E.M. Forster’s novels and essays, and having loads of conversations with my friends who are budding philosophers and psychoanalysts about the meaning of desire and love, I have been thinking a lot about the philosophy and ontology of love, and a lot about the space between loving a person and loving people, and a lot about the space between thinking about love and doing love. I was reminded that love can sometimes be very political—something that, these days, I often forget, despite my thesis topic—when I read a NYT column in which Frank Bruni criticized (as we have done here so many times) the “Born This Way” attitude to gay identity.
Bruni’s column begins with the story of the actress Cynthia Nixon, who has recently caused a storm of controversy by calling her “gayness”—in the form of her decision to, after years of partnership with a man, start a family with a woman—”a choice.” Bruni holds that, rather than thinking that Nixon has hurt the LGBT cause by declining to repeat the “being gay is not a choice” mantra, we ought to see things rather differently:
But while her critics have good reason to worry about how her words will be construed and used, they have no right to demand the kind of silence and conformity from Nixon that gay people have justly rebelled against. She’s entitled to her own truth and manner of expressing it.
Besides which, there are problems with some gay advocates’ insistence that homosexuality be discussed and regarded as something ingrained at the first breath.
By hinging a whole movement on a conclusion that hasn’t been — and perhaps won’t be — scientifically pinpointed and proved beyond all doubt, they hitch it to a moving target. The exact dynamics through which someone winds up gay are “still an open question,” said Clinton Anderson, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns Office of the American Psychological Association. “There is substantial evidence of various connections between genes, brain, hormones and sexual identity,” he said. “But those do not amount to a simple picture that A leads to B.”
Bruni goes on to point out that we shouldn’t need to argue that homosexuality is something with which we’re born to argue that it should fall under the rubric of civil liberties. As should come as no surprise, this is nothing new. As I’ve been writing about this week, Symonds knew that trying to probe the medical and psychological reasons why we are the way we are, why we desire what and whom we desire, can be one route to understanding ourselves. That’s why he read widely in the field of sexual science (though wound up dismissing as ill-founded or illogical most of its findings), was interested in the developing field of the study of human consciousness, and collaborated with a doctor, Havelock Ellis, on an academic book about “sexual inversion” that was intended to be equal parts cultural-historical and medical. (Symonds died before the manuscript was completed, and Ellis’ subsequent work shifted it heavily towards the medical side.)
But although Symonds tried to understand sexual science, I don’t think he ever wound up thinking that it had helped him to understand what it is like to love, and especially to love outside the patterns for which one’s particular society has words and rules. Some of the first questions that Symonds asked about desire and love, when he was a teenager, were about how to keep from being controlled by one’s desires, how to translate desire into something good and noble, how to better oneself through loving and being loved. The literature that Symonds used to answer questions like these was catholic, but it was overwhelmingly literary: Plato, Dante, Walt Whitman, and many others. And after a couple years of work on sexual science, he came back to the canon—the last book he ever wrote was a study of Whitman’s poetry.
I think this is because Symonds was above all a humanist, and an ethicist. Though he was curious about how many people in his culture were, like him, homosexual, and about how they got that way, he knew that wouldn’t help him to answer the questions he believed to be most fundamentally human. Knowing definitively whether our desires were determined by our genes or moulded in early childhood or culturally constructed or something we can shape through conscious effort or something else entirely does not help us to understand how to get on in the world once desire and love—for anyone, anything—are things that are part of our life experiences. Having a word like “gay” or “straight” to call ourselves doesn’t really help us to know when it is right to reach out and touch the object of our desires, and when to let well enough alone. Knowing when in our lives we first began to feel the stirrings of desire—and knowing that that slight nausea and tightness in the stomach and quickening of the heart is “desire”—doesn’t help us to translate what we want of others into our willingness to give ourselves to them. And being political about the right to marriage, as noble a cause as that may be, doesn’t help us to be married, or even more generally “companioned” or “partnered”—doesn’t help us to turn our bodily wants into the kind of connection that not only assuages loneliness but leads the soul to sprout wings and take flight.
At the end of his article, Bruni coins a phrase that’s wonderfully admitting of nuance, “moved to love”:
I use the words “moved to love” in an effort to define the significant, important territory between “born this way” and choice. That solid ground covers “built this way,” “oriented this way,” and “evolved this way”; it incorporates the possibility of a potent biological predisposition mingling with other factors beyond anyone’s ready control; and it probably applies to Nixon herself.
We love in the most unpredictable ways. Sometimes we find ourselves loving in ways that our society clearly doesn’t admit, and we write books and wage campaigns to have our love declared an equal inalienable right. But sometimes we merely find ourselves loving in ways that are a little different, or unexpected: the best friends who, without ever having sex, give all of themselves to each other, reminding those of us who study the homoerotic literary tradition that Adhesiveness and “the love of comrades” have always been more than an identity politics; the woman who finds that the shifting genders of her lovers, long past the accepted period of “experimentation,” defies the easy application of a label of sexual orientation; the woman in her early twenties who feels at the same time as if she could be fifteen or thirty-five, and who against all her expectations finds herself on the eve of her last undergraduate term feeling a desire for connection that she never dreamed she’d feel, and who turns to men who write about impossible love for other people in other times and places to explain it.
These are understandings of the muddles and fallibilities of love and the humans who are moved to it that transcend any kind of identity politics or label or taxonomic, empirical explanation. As Symonds knew 120 years ago, human feeling is a many-splendored thing that must be understood as such, not crammed into any kind of rubric. Our only duty is to ensure that this powerful force is to be used responsibly and well, purposed to the highest good of making the world better and brighter, and that the communities we build allow for this to be a central and noble endeavor.
A Year in Review: Lessons Learned and Things to Be Done; or, On What Matters 30 December 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Ethics, Oxford, Personal Life, Thesis.add a comment
This has been a year of comings and goings. I ended 2010 with a post on that theme, suggesting that I had it All Figured Out: that the university qua idea was my home, that I was at ease with myself and my place in the world, that I was psychologically prepared to spend the majority of the coming calendar year living abroad alone.
Of course, things were a bit trickier than that. I filled the pages of this blog quite a bit over the coming year, and particularly those parts that I spent in the UK. All year, as I travelled from British Columbia to Princeton, from Princeton to Oxford, from Oxford to Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, London, Bristol, and back again, from Oxford to Princeton and New York and Rhode Island and southern California and back to Princeton and finally back to the sun-drenched kitchen table with a view of the San Juan Islands where I wrote last year that I was done searching—well, dear reader, I searched. I searched for myself, I searched for others, I searched for places to live and people to love, I searched for goodness and for emptinesses and ways to fill them. I got some answers, then found I had still more questions.
Sitting again at the kitchen table with the Christmas tablecloth, catching up on the Radio 3 Christmas programming, rejoicing that the sun is out and warming the house for the first time in a week, I find myself facing a year of more comings and goings. On the fifth of June I am finally going to have my long-dreamt-of bachelor’s degree, and the university and town where I have lived for much of the past three and a half years isn’t going to be my home anymore. Yesterday, I was researching flights and looking at a map of Europe and dreaming very big indeed about the new places I want to see this summer. In October I will cross the Atlantic again, I will come back to the city of dreaming spires, I will spend a day parading around in subfusc and just like that I’ll be a member of a university again.
But it will be so different from the last time: my eyes won’t widen in alarm at all the trappings of Oxford pomp and circumstance—in part because I’ve seen it all before, but in part because I will be a grad student, an adult, who lives in a flat and cycles into town every day to go to work in the Upper Reading Room. And what, I have to ask, does this mean for comings and goings, for people and places, for my presently long-distance relationship with the city of Oxford, my first love? What does this mean for loving? What does this mean for connecting?
I first heard E.M. Forster’s name seriously mentioned over a year ago. Of course, I’d heard it before; of course, me being me, most of what I knew about him was that he was gay, or something like it. But I didn’t think that he was someone I ought to read until, in September 2010 or thereabouts, a friend whose literary acumen I highly esteem happened to say that reading Forster in high school had determined him to study literature. This remark had a strong impression on me, and it percolated in the back of my mind until one morning towards the end of last Trinity term when I woke up with a strong desire to Get Into Forster right then and there. I dashed out of college and down Broad Street and into Blackwells and up the stairs to the secondhand department; I bought Howards End, Maurice, and Wendy Moffat’s new Forster biography, which another literary friend had suggested I would enjoy. I came home, I put the books on my shelf, and then I went back to Symonds, and the moment passed. I read the Moffat biography in Paris, and found it very interesting. I read Maurice in London, saw Symonds’ ideas in it, and thought it would be quite useful to the reception chapter of my thesis. But Howards End languished in a suitcase in Oxford, and then it languished on my overflowing bookshelves in Princeton. And then a few weeks ago it was midnight in the room of another friend whose literary acumen I esteem, and we were both trying very hard indeed not to do our schoolwork. He read aloud to me from Howards End and A Room With a View, and I saw what all the fuss was about. As soon as I’d discharged my obligations to my graduate seminar in the history of sexuality and my survey of modern British history and my art history seminar on natural history in America and that literary theory class I decided to audit for some reason, I opened the cover of that Penguin paperback with the Blackwell’s pricetag still on it: One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.
It took me two days to read the book, out here in semi-annual Canadian exile. Very near to the end, there is this exchange between Helen and her sister, Margaret:
“… There’s something wanting in me. I see you loving Henry, and understanding him better daily, and I know that death wouldn’t part you in the least. But I—Is it some awful appalling, criminal defect?”
Margaret silenced her. She said: “It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don’t fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have; love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all—nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others—others go farther still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.
The Penguin paperback is now dog-eared and pencilled beyond all recognition, but of all the monologues where Forster’s own ideas about love and connection burst through the narrative, this is my favorite. I think it speaks better to the more quotidian questions we might have about how to get on in our oh-so-human lives than does the earlier, perhaps more famous, “Only connect!… Live in fragments no longer” bit. I think it has something special to say about the fact that what we may regard as a failure in ourselves—inability to love sufficiently—may simply be evidence that we love differently. And I like that it acknowledges—as Forster does in Howards End several times—that “A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow.”
Because, you see, this year I feel as if I’ve fallen in love with everything but people. I fell in love with Oxford, which I hope I’ll always hold dear as my first love: the only passionate amour I’ve had that I felt was alive, was reciprocated, in terms equal to my own. I fell in love with the idea, or perhaps the ideas, of love: with ἀγάπη and ἔρως, with the universalist commandment to love thy neighbor and with what Plato says happens when one beholds one’s particular beloved: one’s soul “is moistened and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy.” I fell in love with the idea of the salvific, grace-giving force of humanity. I fell in love with the idea that only connecting will help us through our muddles and heal the wounds of our messed-up world.
By the time I read Howards End last week I felt as if I knew this—I’d been working toward it all year. It was there in what I thought about Symonds and in what he thought about l’amour de l’impossible. (For, after all, I have written more words about Symonds this year than I have ever written about anything in my life, and the love—for a rather small and unimportant man who has been dead over a hundred years—that it requires to sustain a project of this length and type is great indeed.) It was there when I thought about how we all make our own cultural compasses, and how so often what teaches we lonely dorky kids to love is the books that tell us that we’re not alone. It was there when I thought about the meaning of theology, of grace, of taking love on faith.
I know that my discovery of Christianity as a discourse that makes sense to me has unnerved, disturbed, and troubled some of my readers. But in a funny way it’s what really made Howards End the apotheosis of this Year in Emily’s Ideas. Christianity is a system of religious devotion that people have created to help them to access the universe’s great mysteries, and the beautiful words of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are therefore a part of the “religion of humanity,” of all that is good in our world where people live—where, since we can’t answer the most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and its first causes and why what is good is good, we’ve just got to get on with loving each other, since each other and the things we can create are all we have. Sometime between Episcopalian Lessons and Carols in the last week of term and Christmas Day, I was much impressed by this excerpt from a post UMass-Amherst philosophy professor Louise Antony wrote on the NY Times’ “Stone” blog:
Suppose that you do something morally terrible, something for which you cannot make amends, something, perhaps, for which no human being could ever be expected to forgive you. I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief. You cannot have that if you are an atheist. In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.
Some people think that if atheism were true, human choices would be insignificant. I think just the opposite — they would become surpassingly important.
If the Earth is our world and it is all we have, it is our responsibility to do all the loving, all the forgiving, all the good works, all the bettering. We’ve got to make the most of our time in it, no matter what we might or mightn’t think will happen to us when we die. We’ve got to make sure that every day, we wake up sure in the knowledge that today we will get better, we will be better, we will do better, we will treat others better. I thought a lot this year about bettering, about how we treat others, about how we behave amongst others. Now, having the Forsterian language at my disposal, I might say that a prerequisite for connecting is sociability—by which I mean keeping yourself open to meeting others and learning from them and being willing to teach if there is something they can learn from you. I mean seeing the attempt to make connections as a good in itself, I mean setting up institutional structures so that this kind of connecting can take place, and I mean valuing conversations that mean something and get somewhere. I noted this year that, for all its faults, Oxford is very good at doing this, and I noted that Princeton is rather less so, but that it’s worth working to make Princeton better.
It is universities where I live; unsurprisingly, I have a keen interest in university policy. I take a great deal of pleasure in asking, what does my university life have to do with sociability? How can we build a wider world where it is Good to come round for a cup of tea? Let a thousand flowers bloom, of course, but in my life it’s the humanities that help me to connect, to find in me that which is universally human and therefore that which I owe to others and to myself. I’m thinking about a really lovely article that Mary Beard wrote in the last issue of the New York Review of Books, which talks about how the study of the classics helps us to understand “the gap between antiquity and ourselves,” and how it also occasions “a due sense of wonderment” at the copious quantities of “human documents” (Symonds) that survive to sing, O Muse, of the ideas people thought and the feelings that they felt two millenia ago. I thought a lot this year about what being a humanist has taught me about these themes of continuity and change, and I thought a lot about how we can demonstrate that “a due sense of wonderment” and the self-knowledge that, I hope, ensues are goods without slipping into the realm of another discourse, like that of political economy. To get there, I had to work through modes of apology and of hysteria. But I ended the year rather at Mary Beard’s position: that not everyone needs to be a humanist, but that we do as humans need to believe that some people should be. That sublimity is something that we’re capable of as humans, and that beauty is something we can all seek, study, and share. That beauty is Homer and Shakespeare and the Bhagavad Gita, and beauty is young adults sitting up all night talking because they are young enough to think so much and feel so much and love so much.
This is an optimistic note on which to end my twenty-second year. But where do we go from here? This year, I learned to value love, and to love the idea of people, to love humanity. But how, now, do I love persons? How do I love myself? If I have discovered the secret of loving humanity, why do I feel lonely so often, experience so many dark nights of the soul? Well, perhaps I haven’t really discovered anything; after all, I’m still so very young and naïve and inexperienced of the world. And perhaps dark nights of the soul are as much a piece of humanity as sublimity is, the price we pay for the moments of ecstasy that sit alongside them in the panoply of things we feel that make us certain we are alive. But I have to keep wondering whither this state of mind will lead, in 2012. I can’t help but think that if I were truly one of Forster’s people who “catch the glow” from a place rather than a person, I wouldn’t feel the void of people-loving so much in my soul. Will going back to the city that I love keep me from learning to love people, too? I think about how Matthew Arnold figures Oxford as an alluring woman in the preface to Essays in Criticism:
And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tubingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend’s highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him;— the bondage of ‘was uns alle bandigt, Das Gemeine’! She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?
You could hardly fail to fall in love with a city like this. Which means that sublimation can, at times, be just a little too successful.
Yet, even in Oxford, it is possible to connect. Perhaps, for those of us who find connecting rather hard, it may be possible to do so more successfully in the “home of lost causes” than anywhere else. The September 5 issue of the New Yorker included Larissa MacFarquhar’s excellent profile of the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, who recently wrote an enormous ethics tome called On What Matters. I don’t have a subscription to the magazine, and so can’t access the article anymore, but I remember that amidst explanations of Parfit’s ideas about ethics was the moving story of how this shy, almost reclusive man, a quintessential bachelor don who lived in his rooms in All Souls, recently met a woman philosopher and moved into a little Oxford terraced house with her. They married, I think, just for tax reasons, but the important point is that they made a life together and made each other less alone. I think that story is what I’m going to take with me most this year, as the message for this year ending and the one to come. It tells me that there is hope yet for connection—even when the causes seem most lost, even when the beliefs seem most forsaken—and that love and bettering and goodness and connection come in many forms, and are furthered by many kinds of people.
QOTD (2011-12-16) 16 December 2011
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Henry James wrote “The Author of Beltraffio,” about an “aesthetic” writer and his wife and child, after Edmund Gosse told him about the strange and rather ambivalent relationship Gosse’s friend J.A. Symonds had with his (Symonds’) wife. James only ever met Symonds once, briefly (though after Symonds’ death James regretted never having got to know him); what is incredible is that, only on Gosse’s hearsay, James constructed this knowing portrait of Symonds’ intellect and work:
On that high head of the passion for form—the attempt at perfection, the quest for which was to his mind the real search for the holy grail—he said the most interesting, the most inspiring things. He mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives he had known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the time that was dear to him beyond all periods, the Italian cinquecento. It came to me thus that in his books he had uttered but half his thought, and that what he had kept back—from motives I deplored when I made them out later—was the finer, and braver part. It was his fate to make a great many still more ‘prepared’ people than me not inconsiderably wince; but there was no grain of bravado in his ripest things (I’ve always maintained it, though often contradicted), and at bottom the poor fellow, disinterested to his finger-tips and regarding imperfection not only as an aesthetic but quite also as a social crime, had an extreme dread of scandal. There are critics who regret that having gone so far he didn’t go further; but I regret nothing—putting aside two or three of the motives I just mentioned—since he arrived at a noble rarity and I don’t see how you can go beyond that.
QOTD (2011-10-15) 15 October 2011
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Sometimes Symonds writes these poems that are so thick with pathos that it makes me want to say “oh, sweetie,” and give him a big hug. This is entitled “The Fall of a Soul,” and it’s from the “juvenilia” section of his Vagabunduli Libellus:
I sat unsphering Plato ere I slept:
Then through my dream the choir of gods was borne,
Swift as the wind and lustrous as the morn,
Fronting the night of stars; behind them swept
Tempestuous darkness o’er a drear descent,
Wherethrough I saw a crowd of charioteers
Urging their giddy steeds with cries and cheers
To join the choir that aye before them went:
But one there was who fell, with broken car
And horses swooning down the gulf of gloom;
Heavenward his eyes, though prescient of their doom,
Reflected glory like a falling star;
While with wild hair blown back and listless hands
Ruining he sank toward undiscovered lands.
Gay Greats: Questions of Canonicity; or, In Which I Am a Fuddy-Duddy 18 August 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Cultural Criticism, LGBT, Oxford, Thesis.1 comment so far
As an undergraduate in the heady atmosphere of mid-19th-century Oxford, John Addington Symonds studied something called “Literae humaniores,” or “Greats.” It was a curriculum of what we might today call western civ (indeed, Columbia still calls its western civ core curriculum “Lit. Hum.”): mostly classics, Greek and Latin literature and history, with some modern philosophy and ethics thrown in. It was the first secular course introduced to Oxford, a curriculum that, especially in Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol, hoped to prepare successful graduates to govern the empire. It prepared Symonds, recipient of one of the highest Firsts in his year and a variety of very prestigious university prizes, to write a sweepingly comprehensive cultural history of the Italian Renaissance, and then to formulate what I argue was the first academic theory of homosexual identity. It was a rigorous curriculum, and a curriculum that defined the education of individuals from Symonds (and Pater, Swinburne, Wilde, etc.) right down to some of my friends in Oxford today. Greats has changed from its 19th-century incarnation: a lot of knowledge has been added to classics and philosophy in the past 150 years; Oxford no longer (universally) wants its graduates to govern the empire or enter the clergy; and its students are no longer (universally) public-schoolboys who have been drilled relentlessly in Greek and Latin grammar from the age of seven onwards. But one of the facts that bowled me over when I was at Oxford—and that did much to sum up what was strange and otherworldly about that city of dreaming spires—is that I actually hung out with people who studied the same stuff Symonds did. Time moves slowly in Oxford. It’s conservative. It cares about canon.
Anyone with an inkling of a 21st-century liberal-arts education will have been trained to read that preceding paragraph for all the old-boyism, all the white male upper-class privilege, Greats enshrines. It’s the old wrinkled center of what Oxford is: academic conservatism all the way down. And yet, puzzlingly, I was well and truly seduced by that strange fairy city. Like Sue says in Jude the Obscure, Jude, and indeed, I, think “it is a great centre of high and fearless thought, instead of what it is, a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition.” And thus I sit here in my annual August exile far away in rural British Columbia: organizing my Symonds research, listening to my Oxford playlist, and throbbing with a dull ache of love for a city that is about nothing so much as it is about canon, about doing things because that is the way they have always been done.
The thing is, I grew up with canon. I was raised in the western humanist tradition, with Great Books and dead languages. I come from a family who decided it would be a fun bonding activity one Thanksgiving to read Paradise Lost out loud together, and my parents feared for my safety when I climbed on top of the toy car to recite monologues from Macbeth. Growing up, my favorite page in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language was the one that illustrated the Indo-European language family by listing the Lord’s Prayer in a variety of Indo-European languages. Growing up, I had a favorite page in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. I read Victorian novels because as a Victorianist, it’s my job, but also because, if you were raised in the western humanist tradition, that’s what you do. I was raised to think—despite everything that I know about the privilege the western civ narrative enjoys, and how problematic that is—that someone needs to study these books, to remember them, to cherish them (I keep telling people I’m really quite conservative, and no one believes me… well, guys, here’s the proof). And I was raised to follow my intellectual passions, so I have guiltily burrowed my way deep inside some American child’s version of Arnoldian Culture, and wormed my way out the other end only to find myself an adult writing a thesis about John Addington Symonds.
What I’m doing with Symonds doesn’t necessarily bespeak “Greats” on the face of it. I’m writing about the construction of male homosexuality, engaged enough with the world of queer theory to know that I am making an intercession into the scholarly literature by challenging the Foucauldian presumption that only regulating entities were interested in defining homosexuality, rather than just going with the flow. I know that this is something professional historians are interested in these days. I’m happy to get bogged down in deconstructive wordplay as much as the next person with a smattering of lit-crit background. But at the same time, this isn’t a project in gender studies or queer theory, as much as I respect those fields and the people who work in them. It’s a project for which I’ve started to learn Greek and dusted off my Latin. It’s a project that’s involved teaching myself Greek literature, Renaissance art, Victorian politics and culture, Anglo-American utopian socialist literature, and generally trying to get inside the mind of an Oxford-educated Victorian man of letters and to see the world through his eyes. I am trying to figure out why Symonds was as a young man unable to find words to express “l’amour de l’impossible,” and why later in his life he found those words and set out on a crusade to spread them, by understanding what he thought was important—and why his narrative of what homosexual identity is encompassed Plato and Michelangelo and Walt Whitman.
I’m doing this in part because I was already at least halfway there myself. I work easily within this kind of cultural narrative. Recently, I realized that although in my academic work I try to be distanced and critical and deconstruct my own narratives, what I call “the homoerotic literary tradition” is really just “gay Greats.” This idea that stretches throughout the late 19th, 20th, and now the 21st centuries of privileged white gay men finding out who they are through reading is nothing more than a recasting of the western canon, looking at the same core curriculum through, er, lavender-colored glasses. And if you like, the Wizard of Oz allusion there is even deliberate: now the gay canon extends on its own path from the gay liberation era onwards, encompassing modern literary figures reclaimed and the new phenomenon of cultural figures who are openly gay from the start of their careers; a musical narrative in which Lady Gaga is the heir to ’70s disco; gay places and gay spaces; and increased points of contact between the stereotypical gay male culture and the other multivalent queer cultures that now challenge and undermine its hegemony.
I have been wondering more or less since I became involved in queer politics, culture, and history about issues of canon and hegemonic cultural narratives: does it matter that many young queer people have never heard of or read anything by Oscar Wilde? do gay people have to support same-sex marriage? are allies allowed into gay parties? to what extent is Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” a problematic song? Making the queer-theoretical move of disengaging a homosexual sexual orientation that is in some sense intrinsic to one’s biology and/or psychology from a gay culture that treats these very specific cultural flashpoints as shibboleths solves some of the problems but not all of them. For me, my recourse to the gay canon as a woman—even as a woman scholar—is a fraught issue; that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg of identity-politics questions about who has access to this narrative and whom it speaks to.
But I think it can help us if we treat this canon like we do the old Greats curriculum, or American western civ à la the Columbia or Chicago core curricula. Greats is one path of study among many at Oxford; Columbia and Chicago are two universities among many with different approaches to the idea of liberal-arts education. (C.f. Princeton, which offers an optional rigorous first-year western civ sequence, an option availed of by only a few freshmen exceptionally passionate about the concept.) And so is gay Greats only one route among many to a sense of self-worth and self-understanding. We all make our own cultural compasses.
But as something of an expert about this canon, I do have a couple caveats. At risk of sounding like the conservative elite that I am, I think we should respect this tradition, even if at a distance, for the breathtaking goodness it has done for those to whom it speaks. We need to destabilize its hegemony, yes, but that doesn’t mean disavowing the fact that a litany of lives have been saved by Plato’s Symposium. (And people repurpose the canon in unconventional ways: the avant-garde musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, whose protagonist exhibits an ambivalent and complicated relationship to gender and to privilege, borrows the creation myth that Aristophanes relates in the Symposium, of two-person people cut in half by Zeus, as the show’s central motif.) I also think that the need to respect this tradition for what it is means that if you are going to do it, you should do it right. You don’t have to speak about Oscar Wilde as one of your heroes to be a member of the club. But if you are going to plant your lipsticked lips on his tomb in Père Lachaise, you should learn a little about his life and read Dorian Gray and some of his plays and essays. If you are going to play gay anthems in your bar, you should know what the lyrics are, and what meanings lie behind the messages-of-self-empowerment-set-to-disco-beats of the moment (or of yesteryear). We are fortunate today that there are many ways to be queer, and that many people don’t even feel the need to label their sexual identities at all. But while getting a degree in non-western area studies and shaking free of the expectation to care about dead white men is totally awesome, that doesn’t mean it’s right to actually misquote Shakespeare.
Canons are constructs. Symonds, who didn’t think his feelings for men were precisely sexual until he was in middle age, and who struggled in his later work theorizing about homosexual identities and communities to pinpoint a difference between “congenital” and “acquired sexual inversion,” could certainly have told you that “Born This Way” we aren’t. But I, for one, am still in guilty shamefaced love with Oxford, “timid obsequiousness to tradition” and all. After all (and here’s where the conservatism comes in again) you know what doesn’t crumble into dust at the slight prod of a deconstructive finger? “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular, to you; and here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met—maybe even someone long-dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
QOTD (2011-08-02) 2 August 2011
Posted by Emily in QOTD, Thesis.add a comment
Walt Whitman removed this verse from later editions of his “Calamus” cycle, but here it is, as it appeared in the first, 1860 edition:
Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me—O if I could but obtain knowledge!
Then my lands engrossed me—Lands of the prairies, Ohio’s land, the southern savannas, engrossed me—For them I would live—I would be their orator;
Then I met the examples of old and new heroes—I heard of warriors, sailors, and all dauntless persons—And it seemed to me that I too had it in me to be as dauntless as any—and would be so;
And then, to enclose all, it came to me to strike up the songs of the New World—And then I believed my life must be spent in singing;
But now take notice, land of the prairies, land of the south savannas, Ohio’s land,
Take notice, you Kanuck woods—and you Lake Huron—and all that with you roll toward Niagara—and you Niagara also,
And you, Californian mountains—That you each and all find somebody else to be your singer of songs,
For I can be your singer of songs no longer—One who loves me is jealous of me, and withdraws me from all but love,
With the rest I dispense—I sever from what I thought would suffice me, for it does not—it is now empty and tasteless to me,
I heed knowledge, and the grandeur of The States, and the example of heroes, no more,
I am indifferent to my own songs—I will go with him I love,
It is to be enough for us that we are together—We never separate again.
Symonds first heard of Whitman when he went to visit FWH Myers (ODNB) in Cambridge in 1865. The two were sitting in Myers’ rooms at Trinity, and Myers read this verse aloud to Symonds. That moment changed the life of the 22-year-old budding scholar, who much later would write that, “had it not been for the contact of his fervent spirit with my own, the pyre ready to be lighted, the combustible materials of modern thought awaiting the touch of the fire- bringer, might never have leapt up into the flame of lifelong faith and consolation.”
Reading this poem again, it’s really not hard to see why.
l’amour de l’impossible; or, In Which a Sermon Is Attempted 31 July 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Ethics, Personal Life, Thesis.1 comment so far
What is a utopia?
When we ask such definitional questions, we often find ourselves starting with a definition. From the Greek, a ου-τοπος is literally a “no-place,” and it is a concept that has been deployed by countless writers and thinkers since Thomas More to describe places, ideas, societies, and conditions that are not. Utopias can be bad or good or morally ambiguous; however, they are often constructed in order to describe what could be, or what one wishes could be. They tend to be worlds in which people get on rather more harmoniously than they do in our own.
For John Addington Symonds, utopia was a world where l’amour de l’impossible was possible. It was a world where human relations were stretched into new permutations, and where the morality that governs such human relations could be bent ever so slightly to accommodate “an intense, jealous, throbbing, sensitive, expectant love of man for man.” Symonds described his impossible love in this way in an 1889 letter to Walt Whitman, and it was Whitman whose own utopic hymn to “the new City of Friends” did so much to shape Symonds’ sense of what could be. In his Memoirs, Symonds wrote that L’amour de l’impossible est la maladie de l’âme (the illness of the soul); in the margins of Whitman’s “Calamus,” he wrote that “Comradeship is… a need of the soul”—medicine for the illness. Through Whitman’s gospel above all else, Symonds kept alive his faith in the achievability of this new world where something crudely degenerate could be exalted, and where Symonds himself could find peace and satisfaction.
What is a utopia? That is one utopia: one where the word “love” is transfigured, and where sexual satisfaction may be glorified. And as Symonds found himself shaping it in his mind, he also found himself beset by doubt in the promise of a different utopia, the one promised by the devout, God-fearing, Low-Church tradition in which he was raised, in which the Kingdom of God awaited the good. Aside from a few exceptions—such as when his eldest daughter died—Symonds had by his late twenties largely moved away from the Christianity that dominated his youth. He fell into its familiar rhetorical strides when writing his sister or his aunt a Christmas letter, and he remained an active patron of the English Church at Davos, Switzerland, where he spent the last fifteen years of his life. But it was in large part a habitual, cultural Christianity: after his undergraduate years, he did not write rapturously of epiphanies achieved while kneeling in chapels—nor even of choristers loved. In Symonds’ adulthood, as alternative gospels assumed priority in his worldview, even his sites of sexual attraction shifted from cathedrals to the secular spaces of schoolrooms, Swiss mountain slopes, and the banks of the Serpentine, as he proposed to live rather more pantheistically in “the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful.”
But on the last day in July, 153 years after Symonds’ first date (if we may be so presentist to call it that) in the cloister of Bristol Cathedral, a rather old-fashioned sermon was preached in that self-same house of worship about poverty and humility and the Kingdom of God. It ended on R.S. Thomas’s oft-quoted-in-sermons poem “The Kingdom”:
It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
What is a utopia? Well, Thomas here offers us another one: the Kingdom of God, where admission is by faith alone, where the good are rewarded with more goodness, where no one covets either riches or each other. And this is the sticking point: a Doubting Symonds Scholar may find herself looking up at the pulpit and thinking, it’s no wonder that a man striving for a world where there are more ways to love and to be loved ceased to seek solace in those men who proposed to speak in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The love of God as delimited by such men can only go so far, then: pantheist and pagan, Symonds may have preferred Zeus, who at least had Ganymede going for him, than the Christian God.
But I think there is also more in the Thomas poem than meets the eye: for it is also promised us that in the Kingdom of God, “the consumptive is/Healed.” When I heard the preacher read this line out, I found myself hearing it as if “The Consumptive” was capitalized, as if it referred to one particular Consumptive: one particular member of this cathedral’s very diocese whose consumption led him away from England and away from its Church. It is a common trope in literature that the homosexual man is wasting away, and I don’t just mean from AIDS: the perceived moral degeneracy of his condition is figured in the metaphorical terms of a chronic illness. So it often seems with the real-life ill health of Symonds, whose consumption was assuredly compounded by the depression and anxiety visited upon him by the impossibilité of his amour. If Symonds were to be healed, it would not only mean restoring his lungs to their former robustness, but also transplanting him into a utopia where love of any kind is not a maladie.
The incredible, awe-inspiring thing about Symonds is that by the end of his too-short life he knew where to find this utopia, how to make it. He knew to look in Whitman, and in others who wrote in transcendent terms, like Goethe; in the newest advances of science, of evolution and psychology; in a canon of writers including Plato and Michelangelo and in the homoerotic, Hellenistic spirit they conveyed; and, yes, in the Hebraic spirit too. For despite all his very deep doubt, despite the clearness to him that the modern Christian world would not admit the possibility of his love (to the detriment of his and others’ mental health), Symonds never really left the faith into which he was born. To read his poetry, into which his tortured, impossible longings are intensely and intently sublimated, is to read, alongside dense references to classical mythology, a constant refrain of trinitarian imagery, and to hear the deliberate echoes of poets who negotiated the boundaries of Christian faith and reason, like Petrarch and Milton. I don’t think these are just the unconscious effects of being steeped in a Christian culture. As he did in so many other instances, I think Symonds is again working as hard as he can to stretch the fabric of the culture just wide enough to let l’amour de l’impossible slip in, allowing Platonic love to nestle neatly alongside Dantesque chivalric love. The Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful were Symonds’ Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—and he too, through the deployment of a doctrine of love, wanted to make utopia here on Earth.
To a devout Christian, Symonds, and indeed I writing (preaching?) here, have stretched and bent and twisted the paradigms and doctrines of Christianity beyond all recognition. In church, there is a line of metaphor and symbolism beyond which the language does not go (and this is why, out of all the bits and pieces of a given Anglican service, the one I the non-Christian do not say is the Creed). There is only so much one can do to bend before the framework shatters and falls to the ground. And yet I do not believe that Symonds thought he had done this, and here is the rub. For Symonds knew better than I that Jesus told His disciples to “Love one another,” and at the end of the day Symonds was all about love. Though he spoke as passionately as perhaps anyone has ever done about the need to repeal the Labouchere Amendment and decriminalize “gross indecency between males,” it was not so much in a literal sense, so that men would be free to have sex with each other. Rather, it was in a spiritual sense—as he wrote in his appendix to Sexual Inversion, it was so that men’s souls might not be destroyed as he felt his had been by the pressures of the double life. He was all about homosexual rights for the sake of making the double life whole—and good, and beautiful—and for the sake of letting us love one another.
And so here we come to the point in the sermon when the preacher, who has rambled incoherently about a few texts for a few minutes, tries desperately to leave her parishioners with the impression that she has half a brain and can tie all the threads together. We ask, again: what is a utopia?
Drawing my answer not from the Bible—or at least, not only from the Bible—but rather from the humanist (what Philip Pullman, lo these many months ago, called the pagan) tradition, I can answer that a utopia is a land where there are many roads to goodness and to love. It is a land where we all toil alongside each other on the uphill climbs towards our own Celestial Cities, each person seeking the best of all possible paths (for this is, after all, utopia), the one that will best help her to make her life whole. It is a land where as well as loving one another we learn from each other, and we feel free to share with each other whatever we hope will help us to stretch the fabric and patch the holes of the belief systems that help us to wake up in the morning and to go to sleep at night having done something worthwhile with the day. It is a land where the impossible is possible, and where pagan humanist Doubting Symonds Scholars find themselves in church on Sundays, hearing (and perhaps even offering a few) prayers to the Christian God.
Adventures in the Archives; or, In Which Professional Homosexuality Takes a New Turn 21 July 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Thesis.3 comments
The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (a particular interest of mine back when I was a teenage sexologist) was always delighted to lay claim to a rather queer familial lineage: he’d slept with his much-adored mostly-straight friend Neal Cassady, who had slept with a man named Gavin Arthur (a grandson of the U.S. President Chester Arthur—J.N. Katz has more about him in Love Stories), who had slept—or, rather, cuddled—with the great and good Gray Poet, Walt Whitman himself. Ginsberg, who saw himself as a poetic heir to Whitman, also saw himself as connected to his idol through the exchange of bodily fluids down the generations. He did the thing that many queer people have done and do, creating a family tree for himself despite the impossibility, in his era, of having a family of his own. And he also thereby connected sexuality and literature, intertwining sexual exchange with a canon of sexual free expression (both men’s vision was comprehensive enough to transcend the narrow band of “homosexual” or “gay,” if such an identity had even existed in Whitman’s time as it did in Ginsberg’s).
I’ve been fascinated for a long time by that story. I love the idea of making sense of yourself and your life and work by crafting a longue-durée narrative into which you can be seamlessly woven. It makes up for not being able to fit yourself into the world in your own time. It’s a different way of thinking about past and present, about similarity and difference, and it’s also the work of historical processes and historical scholarship, writ small.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that in my work on Symonds I have come to focus on Symonds’ role in how middle-class Anglo-American gay male culture creates a way to talk about itself and with that discourse a canon: high-cultural and low-cultural points of reference that provide evidence for the new ways of explaining homosexual identity and that self-identified homosexual men are expected to know. Many of the turn-of-the-century figures who anchor the gay male literary canon are connected by Symonds; some trace their own ways of thinking about homosexual identity directly back to his.
For those who did so, Whitman would therefore have assumed great importance. Though Whitman objected strenuously to Symonds’ appropriation of his universal cosmology as a way to talk about a very particular group of people with a very particular set of desires, he was arguably the biggest influence in Symonds’ eventual self-identification as an Urning, invert, and homosexual. Symonds wrote a lot about Whitman, in all literary forms: from private letters to his closest confidantes, to kind of terrible poetry inspired by him circulated among the same confidantes, to pamphlets circulated to small groups of men sympathetic to dangerous discussions about theories of sexuality, to popular reviews and criticism in the mainstream Victorian press—including a short book called Walt Whitman: A Study—in which the homoerotic subtext to Symonds’ rhapsodizing went unnoticed by all but a few readers. Whitman anchored not only Symonds’ sexual identity, but his sense of himself as a writer and as a human being, and his ideas about where the world was headed. Like Ginsberg, when Symonds speaks about Whitman it’s in mystical, mythological terms: Whitman is a prophet of a new world order, the bearer of a promise that there can be a world where the “love of comrades” is possible.
Today, I spent eight hours in a cluttered, windowless reading room air-conditioned to 18 degrees Celsius in the basement of the University of Bristol Arts and Sciences Library. Towards the end of the afternoon, I submitted a call slip for DM 1254/A400e, an entry listed in the finding aid as “Notes on Leaves of Grass in Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass 1884.” When the archivist reappeared five minutes later with a richly leather-bound volume bearing Symonds’ recognizable bookplate, my stomach flip-flopped, and I could barely keep my voice steady as I cheerily told the archivist I was on the lookout for marginalia. She wasn’t optimistic: “I think there’s a few underlinings.” In the first several pages—”Overtures,” “Starting from Paumanok”—she was right. But as I made my way through “Song of Myself,” the underlining got more frequent, and more excited and involved: there were double and triple outlines, crosses in the margins, all kinds of different ways of registering emotional response to text through pencil markings. And then, well—skipping over the ten missing pages of “Children of Adam” (a frequent target of censorship in the period because of its man-and-woman sexual explicitness)—I came to Calamus. And I caught my breath. And my stomach flip-flopped again. Because there, scribbled all over the pages, covering the margins and the gaps between the stanzas, was Symonds’ so-familiar hand. Not saying anything new, or brilliant, or controversial, or anything that conceptually is absent from his copious writing on Whitman, but words that show him reading the text: summarizing, marking things he doesn’t understand, keeping track of the narrative that the sequence of poems subtly develops, and, importantly, demonstrating evidence of his rather radical reinterpretation of Calamus, and how in his hands the poems took on a life of their own, and came to mean homosexuality in a way they never did in Whitman’s. If I hadn’t been in the reading room—and if I hadn’t been holding an incredibly valuable (and to me priceless) book, I would have cried tears of joy.
I do not live the kind of life that would enable me to craft the kind of sex-partnered lineage Ginsberg did, nor do I have any desire to do so. I am not a Beat poet—I am a historian. I am not a gay man—I try, as faithfully as I can, to tell their culture’s stories. Today I held a book that Symonds not only owned, but wrote in, invested with all the emotional intensity that an incredibly emotionally intense man could muster. If I can say this without doing anything to denigrate or discard those who prefer a lineage of physical contact, I think I am quite happy to be someone who knows the people around which I have built my intellectual world through a lens of intellectual history, in which marginalia have all the cathartic power of an orgasm.
We all make our own cultural compasses. I am profoundly grateful for mine.
Full of life, now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States,
To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence,
To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you.
When you read these, I, that was visible, am become invisible;
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me;
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)
