Gaya Scienza

Summer Leave

It's summer reading season. The question, as always, is: What am I going to read this summer? I always try to reread a classical novel. This year, as far as the field of this blog is concerned, it's Le Cousin Pons. I am also bringing with me a new translation of the letters exchanged between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto. The book is published by Amy Richlin (Marcus Aurelius In Love,The University of Chicago Press, 2006) and is intriguing. I also have a sentimental novel, The Story of a Marriage (Andrew Sean Greer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 208 pp.), for the waiting lines at Disney World, downloaded to my eReader.

Isherwood and his long-term relationship with Don Bachardy are the topics of a recent documentary by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara (Chris & Don: A Love Story). I watched it at the Quad Cinema in the Village, before leaving New York for Miami, a small auditorium which reminded me of the 'cinemas d'art et d'essais' of my youth in Paris... The movie is puzzling... At the start, someone begins to talk. It's the voice of an old lady... until you realize it's Don's voice, today aged 74. Unfortunately a very unpleasant voice, worsened by the mimics of his mouth, when he is being filmed... The film is confusing: old home movies showing scenes remembered out loud by Don... are mixed with scenes played by actors, as the credits at the end of the movie seem to indicate... Isherwood remains physically more or less the same during the time span showed in the movie. He was almost fifty when they met. But Don evolves from a charming and beautiful teenager - he was not even twenty- to a dry old man desperately trying to remain fit through regular workouts at the gym... Sad... But nonetheless a document. Short sequences show Auden, Stravinsky, Burt Lancaster, Tennessee Williams, among others. As Stephen Holden writes in his review for the New York Times, it "is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gay-marriage succeeding in a forbidding climate."

Charlie Crist the Republican governor of Florida who is regularly mentioned as a potential running mate for Senator McCain was interviewed by Deborah Solomon for her weekly page in the New York Time Magazine. Rumors about him being gay have surfaced from time to time, influencing some of the questions - nasty - asked by Ms Solomon to this atypical Republican who does not own any property ("I just never found a need for it") and answers with a certain sense of humor: "You were married nearly 30 years ago, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Do you prefer living alone? I got married and divorced because it didn't work out. I haven't found the right one since. It's really that simple. You can't find one woman in all of Florida? Maybe I have. Stay tuned."

Meanwhile the CDC reported this week that HIV infection and AIDS in men who have sex with men rose significantly from 2001 to 2006.

2008.06.29

California, James and Boys at Sea

Last Monday at 5.01 pm California Supreme Court's reversal of same-sex marriage ban became effective and gay and lesbian marriage licenses began to be issued in several counties. Pictures were featured in most newspapers the following day. In the very conservatives editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, on Saturday, Jonathan Rauch, a senior writer with National Journal,  a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (New York, Holts Paperbacks, 2004, 224 pp.) published a very good paper titled: Gay Marriage Is Good for America... In the meantime, Gore Vidal, asked in the New York Times magazine by Deborah Solomon about the gay marriage said: "I know nothing about it. I don't follow that. Why doesn't it interest you? The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn't seem to interest me."

Paul Fisher has just published House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2008, 704 pp.). Henry James Sr. was an eccentric wealthy New Englander. His offspring often struggled to explain what his vocation was: "Say I'm a philosopher," he once advised them. "Say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind, say I'm an author of books if you like; or, best of all, just say I'm a Student." David Propson, in his review of the book in the Wall Street Journal adds: "There is certainly comedy in Henry James Sr.'s pretensions. As a philosopher, truth-seeker or author he was an eccentric at best, a failure at worst - an unsystematic, Swedenborgian mystic-intellectual. But as a father he could claim some success. He and his practically minded wife, Mary, raised a great novelist, Henry, and a great scholar- intellectual, William, and the posthumously published diary of their sister, Alice, a chronic invalid, is now considered a masterpiece in its own right."

I haven't read Paul Fisher's book, but the the following excerpts from David Propson's review do not encourage me: "T.S. Eliot famously said that Henry James had "a mind so fine no idea could violate it." Mr. Fisher's book is shot through with ideas - many belonging to Freud and Foucault and serving to address tired questions. To wit: Was Henry James gay or not (quite) gay? Mr. Fisher hints at different possibilities before throwing up his hands and concluding that heterosexuality and homosexuality are "themselves a construction of the late nineteenth century, an oversimplified dichotomy set up by German sexologists and adopted by Anglo-American bourgeois culture." OK, then. Mr. Fisher likewise follows Henry's great biographer, Leon Edel (1907-97), in characterizing the relationship between William and James with hints of homoeroticism. But Sheldon Novick has suggested, in "Henry James: The Young Master" (1996), that the popularity of such Freudian readings at mid-century stemmed in part from a desire to be vague about uncomfortable details. In our more open age - when literary theory itself has moved past Freud - it is difficult to know what to make of serious references to the significance of a gift of a pencil sharpener or dreams about flagging sails."

***

Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson's Navy (B.R. Burg, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 240 pp.) is a short, very graphical book. Burg, a Professor of History at Arizona State University, has written extensively on seafarers and sexuality in the age of sail. Boys at Sea is based on his review of thousands of pages of Court martial transcripts kept in the Royal Navy National Archives in Kew, England.

The situation at sea was not disconnected with what was happening on shore, reminds Burg in the first chapter of his book. Sodomy was made contrary to English civil law in 1533 under the reign of Henry VIII. It was included as a capital crime in the laws regulating the navy - The Articles of War, as they became known - during the second part of the 17th century after the restoration of monarchy in 1660. The first recorded trials described by Burg took place between 1704 and 1706. Although by the 1720s "a large and conspicuous all-male, homoerotic confraternity proliferated in London", the "mollies", projecting "a persona - a particular role, and adopting practices that sharply distinguished them from ordinary Englishmen", the Royal Navy remained primarily concerned with acts, not personalities. Burg gives a very detailed description of sexual life on board ships of the Royal Navy in the age of fighting sail until the dawn of the Victorian years. Of course his picture is somewhat biased by the fact that it is based on material resulting from prosecutions only. It reveals what were the attitude and the thinking on sodomy - an abominable crime - among seafarers and how they evolved during the period - slightly... The last case of court martial for sexual misconduct in the Navy occurred in 1838.

2008.06.22

The Bishop's Daughter and The Fisher Boy

Honor Moore is the eldest daughter of the late Paul Moore who was for more twenty years, until his retirement in 1989, the Episcopal Bishop of New York. She is a writer and a poet. In her last book, The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir (New York, Norton, 2008, 352 pp.), she explores the double life of her father, who died in 2003, while trying to come to terms with her own sexuality. It's a terrifying testimony which at moments makes you feel uneasy. It is not for us to judge, neither the Bishop's life, nor his daughter's decision to expose it. She tells us about her own confused sexuality, her shifting from men to women, "the pattern of sexual unhappiness" she had inherited. When she learned that the man she had been dating, after years of affairs with women, had had secret relationships with men... she "came to understand that my own sexual development was inextricably tied up with my father's complicated erotic life" and that it was important for her to understand. "Because I was a writer, understanding meant telling." All right...

In Presence, his own autobiography, published six years before his death, Bishop Moore did not address what was probably at the core of his most intimate life, his closeted homosexuality. Paul Moore married twice but he had sexual encounters with men all along and had even a longtime relationship with a man more than twenty years his junior, Andrew Vervet. Honor met him after her father died. "Your father could never accept that he desired men" he repeated to her. "'Even at the end?' I remembered the male ballet dancer who'd moved in 'to take care of things' at the end of his life, rumors my brothers and sisters had heard."

In the last chapter of her book she recounts her own trip to Patmos in the footsteps of her father who traveled to the Greek island the last summer of his life, with, she later discovered, Andrew. Having missed the last boat they had to spend the night in Samos after flying from Athens. "I imagine that was how my father was with Andrew that night in Samos, his first vacation with a male lover - but the stories he told Andrew that night were from a part of his life he never opened to me. Of his desired for men, its dawning at St. Paul's when ordinary sexual play brought erotic dreams not of girls but of boys, of his first experience with a male pickup in Paris before the war, his first love affair with a man, a married instructor at General Seminary. Of his marriages, how he did not consider his sexual relations with men adultery. By then he and Andrew had known each other for more than twenty-five years, and had talked of many things. Now they were outside of time. My father was not married and no longer the bishop of New York, was in fact considering inviting Andrew to live with him. But Andrew had made an important decision, a decision he shared with my father. He had met a woman he hoped to marry."

When you end reading the beautifully written Bishop's Daughter, you sure are confused and shaken...

***

New good quality gay fiction, whatever it means, is difficult to find... The Fisher Boy (Stephen Anable, Poisoned Pen Press, 2008, 348 pp.) is a mysterious book. I came across it through the pages of Publishers Weekly. It's the first novel by a writer whose short biography on the book jacket reads like this: "Stephen H. Anable was born in Boston and graduated from Stanford and Harvard universities. His short fiction and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies. At various times during his life, he has been a stand-up comic, a journalist, an actor, a social worker, a scriptwriter, and the communication coordinator at a cemetery. He has two sons and lives in Massachusetts."

I wanted to like The Fisher Boy, nonetheless because it is set in Cape Cod. An old school friend of narrator Mark Winslow is murdered on Provincetown gay beach Herring Cove. The Christian Soldiers, a fundamentalist religious group, have setup an office on Commercial Street to try to save the sinners invading Cape Cod during summer. A mysterious group of blond and ragged visitors has settled in the area... Unfortunately the plot becomes too complicated... It's a pity because the story is very well written. I struggled to finish it. Next week, maybe will I go back to Le Cousin Pons which I started to read again in Paris...

2008.06.15

Greek Love

All newspapers have abundantly paid their respects to Yves Saint Laurent after his death last week. In the plane, on my way back to the US last Tuesday, I read in the French daily Libération an interview with Pierre Bergé, "his longtime companion and the co-founder of YSL Couture House". How did you close your deal with Yves Saint Laurent? asks the journalist: "We fall in love. As simple as that."  In the International Herald Tribune, Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic, writes about "the Bergé/Saint Laurent partnership, openly, but never vulgarly homosexual"... Saturday the New York Times (owner of the IHT) printed a photo of Pierre Bergé, escorted by Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy, at the funerals of Yves Saint Laurent. His face bears the traces of grief... The caption identifies him as Yves Saint Laurent's business partner! I would like my business partner to regret me as much...

Hillary Clinton gave her much anticipated speech endorsing Barack Obama in Washington DC this Saturday. I must say I was surprised to hear her mention twice the word 'gay' in her 30' speech, along other minority groups... It was the first time in a campaign where gay themes were not really an issue. But now that she has exited the race she does not need to be as cautious...

In the last issue of The New York Review of Books Edmund White writes about Marguerite Duras. Nothing to make a fuss over. In the contributors list, though, I learned that White will publish a book about Rimbaud this fall: The Double Life of a Rebel. That's certainly more interesting...

***

For several weeks now I have been digging into the thick volume of James Davidson's The Greeks & Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 656pp).

It is surprising the book went almost unnoticed, at least in the US! (The UK papers, including the TLS, ran reviews) As the title rightly points out, it's a radical reappraisal of Greek homosexuality. It revisits the way scholars have been interpreting the topic for the past century, the so-called modern scholarship of Greek Homosexuality, culminating with Sir Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978), which was praised by Michel Foucault as an instant classic. Sodomy was put at the center of Greek homosexuality... What mattered was the opposition between activity and passivity. It was all about "initiation through insemination" and "domination through penetration." Davidson prefers to talk about "Greek Love" and challenges all previous assumptions. He puts back Greek homosexuality in its context, with its complexity and diversity, and is often very convincing in his analyses.

James Davidson is an historian of ancient Greece at Warwick University in the UK. His book is the result of an intellectual journey started almost thirty years ago. It reads like a detective story despite its number of pages, draws on ancient texts and scenes painted on antique cups (sometimes very graphically explicit), analyzes all relevant myths and stories (Ganymedes, Hyacinthus, Achilles and Patroclus, etc.), seeks analogies from anthropologists studies, and depicts the development of modern ideas on Greek homosexuality where Dover, Veyne and Foucault play a significant role.

Davidson's style is brisk, lively, with shortcuts and sometimes playful anachronisms, only someone with deep knowledge and understanding can display... The Greeks and Greek Love is a hallmark in the debates about Greek homosexuality. It needs to be sipped slowly like an aged red Burgundy.

2008.06.08

Still in Paris: Herbart, Mauriac

I have had to extend my stay in Paris for a few days. I know, what a pain... I used the opportunity of these stolen days to read through the volumes of Pierre Herbart still in my library. Le Promeneur has recently published En URSS: 1936 which was out of print. It must be read together with Ligne de force, the more personal memoir published many years later in 1958, where, in his beautiful dry style, Herbart discloses the reasons behind his sudden departure from the USSR in 1936: he had fallen in love with a young man, N., and was afraid of endangering him. He had discovered that in the Country of Socialism, "Homosexuals redeem themselves by reading Marx in concentration camps." In fact he had, lucidly, become disillusioned with the regime, writing at the beginning of En URSS : 1936: "We can now no more defend the USSR without lying and without knowing that we are lying." When he left, he made N. believe he would return. N. wrote several letters to him: "But I could not answer. The slightest note could put N. at risk of loosing his freedom, or could even cost him his life. I felt as if I were repeatedly hitting with a stick a wounded bird that would not die. Eventually, there was silence..." Pierre Herbart has been unduly neglected by the literary criticism. His short, concise memoirs (L'Âge d'or, Souvenirs imaginaires and La ligne de force) are among the great books of the twentieth century. They deserve an English translation...

François Mauriac is the exact opposite of Pierre Herbart. Jean, François Mauriac's second son, was, for more than 30 years, a journalist for the French news agency AFP. He was assigned to covering Charles de Gaulle. Most of the book he wrote with historian Jean-Luc Barré in the form of an interview, Le Général et le journaliste (Paris, Fayard, 2008), is dedicated to his recollections of the great statesman. In the first chapter however he discusses his youth under the shadow of his father ("Une jeunesse mauriacienne"). Jean-Luc Barré, who is writing a biography of F. Mauriac, points out that the famous author liked to be surrounded by young men and wonders whether... "François Mauriac fancied the company of young men. Homosexual, my father? No, certainly not in the sense used in reference to Gide, Cocteau, Jouhandeau or Montherlant ." "He certainly felt friendship, affection, tenderness, even passion for some of these young men. He would suffer." "To tell you the truth we have lived by his side without really understanding François Mauriac. It is unbelievable, isn't it? Only after his death, when his letters were published, when some of his notes were made available, the assessment of the real nature of his homosexuality was possible." "François Mauriac did not need to fight against his sex, but against his heart." "He felt he had to hide his feelings because of religion, his family, his stubborn provincial milieu, his reputation. But let's not regret it: without this true internal drama, never would François Mauriac have been capable of writing the burning, bleak, panting, tragic novels he has written." To be continued...

2008.06.01