Gaya Scienza

Lincoln Kirstein's Ingenuousness

I have been continuing to read Lincoln Kirstein's biography. Duberman makes a heavy use of quotes from his journal. In 1932 his father takes him to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose policies are mentioned in the news almost everyday in this pre-Obama presidency, would secure the nomination. Kirstein is quickly bored at the convention and spends his time visiting the city's museums and going to the movies...

He continues to have sex with men and women and writes ingenuously in his journal in the spring of 1931 about the wife of a Wall Street Journal editor that

she told him that he 'didn't really like women,' that (as Lincoln recorded her words in his diary) 'she found that out when she went to bed with me. That she enjoyed it but she could see my affections were elsewhere. For two hours,' Lincoln commented, 'I felt castrated by her perception but generally speaking pleased at having found not a lover but a friend.'

We also learn earlier in the book that

Much later in life Lincoln wrote that although his mother was 'quite without any sexual prejudice,' she had told him that his father was 'physically cold' and had 'never liked' sex much - perhaps, she added, because as a young man he'd undergone painful mercury injections to cure venereal disease. (Many years later, Lincoln suggested an additional gloss: 'After I left Boston Dad encouraged and even idolized a number of young men whom I also found attractive.')

Let's hope that 2009 will bring us more good books...

2008.12.28

Back in Paris; Best Books of the Year

I arrived in Paris last Wednesday and discovered that part of the transportation system in the northern suburbs was on strike... exactly as three months ago when I was leaving and had to hastily grab a taxi at the Gare du Nord to avoid missing my flight. What a coincidence. They now call it a social protest ("un mouvement social")... Welcome back, did I murmur to myself.

The following books would have been worth mentioning in the Best Books of the Year lists: Honor Moore's The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir (New York, Norton, 2008, 352 pp.) disclosing her father's closeted homosexuality and Paul Fisher's House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2008, 704 pp.), a gossipy and fascinating account of Henry James family, both in the non-fiction category, as well as Neil Bartlett's last novel Skin Lane (Serpent's Tail, 2007, 320 pp.) recently mentioned in this blog.

In the plane, during a flight shortened by strong winds, after perusing the newspapers of the last few days for details about Bernard Madoff's extraordinary story, I started The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (New York, Knopf, 2007, 736 pp.), an absorbing biography of the unconventional arts advocate by Martin Duberman, which has just been reprinted in large paperback. Like his subject, Duberman went to Harvard, although three decades later. His own road toward accepting his homosexuality was painful, as he recounts in Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey. He is striken by the "absence of torment or guilty self-consciousness when Lincoln recorded his various same-sex adventures, sexual or emotional, in his diary."

Perhaps his nonchalance was partly playacting or self-disguise, putting a more composed face on his sexual encounters with men than he actually felt - and there is some evidence for such an interpretation. Perhaps, as an Anglophilic, privileged young man well aware of the endemic homosexuality of upper-class English boarding schools, he simply assumed that his own behavior fell easily within the normal spectrum. Perhaps his 'manly manner' and his simultaneous attraction to women ('refreshing dreams of... a golden beach with girls... all lying about to fondle'), made him feel it would be an inaccurate absurdity to label himself a 'fairy' - the current term and category, one associated with the gender transgressions of effeminacy and cross-dressing. He saw himself as quite unlike that recognizable 'type,' and in his diary periodically disparaged 'effeminate' men. He even, at one time, joined in baiting a classmate he described as a 'horrible homosexual worm... distressingly affected... [with] a bad choppy walk.'

Before my last post of the year, next week, let me wish you all a Merry Christmas.

2008.12.21

Disappointment...

The traditional "Best Books of the Year" feature in mainstream newspapers and magazines have been, this year, rather disappointing with the exception of Pilcrow gathered in the Financial Times which I mentioned in my last post. Some books might have been mentioned. I will come back to that next week...

Maybe as a sort of consolation prize, the cover story of Newsweek magazine (dated December 15th) is dedicated to The Religious Case for Gay Marriage. The article by Lisa Miller is a strong case in favor of gay marriage based on... the Scripture: "Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side. (...) Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should." Andrew Tobias, the openly gay author and journalist, adds in his blog (Money and Other Subjects) with a lot of common sense and some humor:

"And by the way, it’s okay for religions to prohibit gay marriage. It’s civil marriage – mundane things like state-issued marriage licenses and the taxation of health insurance benefits, not “holy matrimony” – that’s in question. No one disputes the right of churches to discriminate or to predict who will and who will not be denied entrance to the kingdom of heaven. But in the meantime, can Charles and I have the same Social Security benefits you do? We pay the same tax rates."

Milk has finally arrived in this not-so-remote place of Connecticut. It has started at a small independent theater in Bethel, which reminds me of the Salles d'art et d'essais in Paris, with the exception of the smell and sound of pop-corn, although this custom has been picking up strongly in France, lately... Sean Penn's performance is amazing. The coming-out story of Harvey Milk, who grew up in New York and remained in the closet well into his forties, is moving.

This type of movie, showing in a positive way gay characters, has nothing to do with nonetheless great movies of the past like Advise and Consent (1962) by Otto Preminger, which I recently saw on DVD, where homosexuals are depicted as unhappy, shameful and weak creatures. It was the first time a gay bar was shown in a mainstream film. Preminger's script is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the same title by Allen Drury published in 1959. According to the DVD commentary, the book, which is currently out of print, is better than the movie...

***

Michael Peppiatt has just published a new book, Francis Bacon: Studies for a portrait (Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 272) which, according to a recent issue of the TLS, "contains interviews with and recollections of the artist from the 1960s almost until his death: that is, either the raw materials of Peppiatt's biography or bits of the biography distilled into essays and articles. For completists only, it does include the full, fascinating text of Bacon's answers when he was interviewed for the first time by his future biographer, in 1963, before celebrity began to overtake some of his responses." By the way his great biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an enigma (1995) has been revised and reissued in paperback by Constable.

2008.12.14