Gaya Scienza

Keynes (cont.); Thomas Mann's children

The first volume of Robert Skidelsky's Keynes biography (John Maynard Keynes - Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920, Macmillan, 1983, 447p) covers the famous economist's life until the end of World War I. We follow him from his birth in Cambridge into a community of dons, to his studies at Eton and King's College, to his becoming a member of the Apostles, to his appointment as a Fellow of King's after a short but influential position as a civil servant in the Indian Office, to his return to civil service at the Treasury during the war.

Keynes's father, Neville, appears as a fascinating character:

By the time Maynard was ten, his father had become a full-time university administrator, and had switched his intellectual energies from his own academic work to worrying about his children's. (...) Neville's life's strategy was an attempt to reduce the pressure on himself. The tasks he set himself once he did not have to 'please others' were such as to minimize strain. Immersion in hobbies was one solution; immersion in work which was intellectually undemanding was another. Unlike Marshall, who early in life abandoned activities which 'led nowhere', Neville increasingly abandoned himself to them.

From childhood Maynard was convinced he was ugly, which might have "contributed to the periods of depression - 'natural sadness' Maynard called them - which Geoffrey remembers in a brother who was 'normally cheerful, witty, and full of self-confidence'." At Eton he had his first sexual experiments with boys. When he moved to Cambridge in 1902 he soon was elected to the Apostles and became a close friend with Lytton Strachey. Two years later their "friendship almost broke up soon after it had started, over competition for the affection of a young Trinity freshman called Arthur Lee Hobhouse":

Schoolboy experiments apart, Hobhouse was the first great love of Keynes's life. Over the next seventeen years he had several love affairs with men, one of them of central importance, as well as a certain amount of casual sex.

But Keynes great love was Duncan Grant, Lytton's cousin and a painter, eighteen months younger than him. The start of their affair coincided with Keynes's return to Cambridge in 1908 and lasted until 1910, although they remained friends thereafter. "Maynard found no one to take Duncan's place in his life. Franky Birrell slept with him 'for old time's sake'; and there were pick-ups."

The pattern of Maynard's wartime life was now established. He spent his days working at the Treasury. The evenings he would spend with others - either with the great and the good or with such friends as remained in London. He took as many week-ends as he could in the country or with his parents at Cambridge. A noticeable change came over his social life. Put bluntly, the supply of young men had dried up. Cambridge was no longer available to replenish his friendships, existing friends were at the Front or scattered round the countryside doing agricultural work.

For the first time in his life, Maynard had to console himself with female companions.

This volume also includes interesting pages on Bloomsbury. The group was 'founded' in 1905 and had strong ties to the Apostles.

After the end of the war, Keynes started penning what was to become The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The book was published in December 1919. It was to become an international best-seller and one of the most influential books of the twentieth century:

The Economic Consequences of the Peace made Keynes world-famous. By writing it he renounced the privacy which he had always valued so highly. Superimposed on private Keynes - the Cambridge don selling economics by the hour, the lover of clever, attractive, unworldly young men, the intimate of Bloomsbury - is the public Keynes of the 1920s - the leading authority on reparations, the monetary reformer, the adviser of governments, the City magnate, the feared journalist whose pronouncements caused bankers and currencies to tremble. Philosophic speculation gave way to financial speculation, conferences jostled with holidays, intimacy merged into patronage. In 1925 the world-famous economist would marry a world-famous ballerina in a blaze of publicity.

But all this is for the following volume...

***

Michael Hofmann, in the TLS, destroys Andrea Weiss's In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain - The Erika and Klaus Mann Story (University of Chicago Press, 2008, 302p). After punching in the face another book about Thomas Mann's relatives, House of Exile - The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Man (Evelyn Juers, Giramondo, 2008, 384p) while concluding that it is "an extraordinary book, and a really rare accomplishment," he writes that Andrea Weiss's book is, "in that British sense, rather ordinary and not at all rare. (...) I wonder whether Thomas's and Katia Mann's two oldest children are worth writing books about..." Hofmann describes Thomas Mann's children as "disappointing, mainly miserable children (they were probably happiest when children, but they made wretched adults), two of whom killed themselves (one asked to be buried as far from his father as could be managed within the confines of the same cementary), and not one of whom could be said to have successfully quit the nest, or the long, finger-pointing shadow of their father, whom they called 'the magician' or 'Z' for short." About Erika he writes: "Her claims to fame were a trip round the world with Klaus in 1927-8." While "Klaus Mann, the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki has said, was triply afflicted: he was gay, he was addicted to drugs, and he was the son of Thomas Mann." Brecht, Auden and Wescott made jokes about him. Then, "It's as though our own age's sense of entitlement had been laid over the already rampant sense of entitlement of Erika and Klaus in Weiss's crude psychologizing and blundering, half-literate phrase making." Wow!

Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English and a translator of texts from German.

2009.04.26

Gustave Caillebotte's Homoeroticism

Gustave Caillebotte stands apart among the Impressionists. His paintings depict working-class men in an urban context in full transformation. Paris was turning into a modern city through Baron Haussmann's renovation. Caillebotte also used very innovative perspectives. What strikes most when viewing the Brooklyn exhibition (Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea ) - and any catalog of his oeuvre, for that matter - is that the paintings are rather personal, autobiographical. You feel as if you were spying on a very private man, whose short life (he died suddenly at 45 from a stroke) remains a mystery.

Even before visiting the exhibition, when reading its review by Holland Cotter (The Reluctant Impressionist) in the New York Times, you start feeling that mystery:

An artist who was an Impressionist by association rather than by style or temperament.

He himself produced work, of a kind that managed to remain somewhat anomalous in any context.

He never felt compelled to develop a strict signature style, and moved back and forth between two kinds of realism, academic and Impressionist, old and new.

He seemed to be in a state of perpetual experimentation, with no absolute rules.

In the end his career as an artist — and the Brooklyn show — feels ragged and unresolved. Certainly it was short. He stopped painting in a focused way in his 30s. By the 1890s he had become a semi-recluse at Petit Gennevilliers. He died there.

But what’s wrong with uneven and unresolved? Caillebotte’s was never a clear-cut Impressionist story, or even a classic artist’s story. Creatively he was a mixed breed, a product of different pedigrees. He fits into no pantheon, matches no ready profile, art historical or otherwise.

His pictures are full of male bodies, often with a concealed face, sometimes juxtaposing bourgeois with workers. The Floor Scrapers (Les raboteurs de parquet) show men at work, shirtless, unveiling their muscular bodies. His rowmen also produce erotic feelings. In the Self-Portrait at the Easel (Autoportrait au chevalet), the artist is painting in his studio, while in the background a man, the bottom half of his face concealed by the painter's arm, reads on a coach. Overall, a diffuse melancholy flows from the paintings... And a definitive homoeroticism.

I have not read any detailed biography of Caillebotte (is there any?), but in the short and sparse biographical notes spreaded in the catalogue of the exhibition nothing points to homosexuality. A few things, though, sharpen one's curiosity. He never married, although "in the eighteen-eighties he seems to have enjoyed a liaison with the younger Charlotte Berthier." And, "It was also in the Cul-Blanc that he sailed in a race in 1885 with another yachtsman, Eugène Lamy, who from then on was to be very close to him. (...) It is apparently also Lamy with whom Caillebotte has shown himself in a tête-à-tête - his last self portrait before his death a few months later - in the remarkable and ambitiously scaled picture, The Banks of the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers, Winter from 1893.(...) The close relationship between Caillebotte and Lamy is also underscored by the fact that on Caillebotte's death Lamy was the owner of some of his major works." I am not suggesting that there was anything more than friendship between Caillebotte and Lamy, who was married and had two young sons who appear, from their back, in The Bank of the River Seine at Petit Gennevilliers (La berge au Petit Gennevilliers et la Seine).

A quick Google search with the words: "Caillebotte and homosexuality" brought back an essay written in 1998 by Jim Van Buskirk, Program Manager, at the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center of San Francisco Public Library: Queer Impressions of Gustave Caillebotte. Van Buskirk reviews Caillebotte's major paintings and provides convincing hints to their homoeroticism. It's a valuable starting point...

***

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a pioneer of Gay Studies, who contributed to the birth of Queer Studies, died last Sunday at the age of 58 from breast cancer. Her most famous book is Epistemology of the Closet (1990). In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), a chapter is dedicated to Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend, drawing "attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, rivals for the love of Lizzie Hexam but emotionally most fully engaged when facing off against each other," writes William Grimes in his obituary in the New York Times.

2009.04.19

Caillebotte?

Another week, another state. Vermont became the fourth state in America to allow same-sex marriage. For the first time through a legislative process. On Tuesday, somewhat unexpectedly, Vermont Congress overrode the Governor's veto of a bill that grants couples of the same sex the right to marry.

Giulia Sissa, whose book I mentioned last week (Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World), is, together with James Davidson (The Greeks & Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece), and whatever her merits, one of the scholars to object to the traditional vision of Greek Love as dominated by the "mechanics of erect sex as excluding a wide range of erotic emotions," as popularized by Foucault and Dover. In "contrast to Davidson, however, Sissa sees femininity as the stimulant source for all these longings and relations," adds Peter Green in his interesting review in the March 4th issue of The New Republic.

These days I was going through several piles of papers I had accumulated over the past few months, trying to tidy up my apartment before the arrival of my daughters for Easter, when I discovered an article by Blake Bailey in The New York Times reviewing the biography of Hopkins by Paul Mariani (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, New York, Viking, 2008, 496p). Bailey is the author of a recent biography of Cheever. I had decided not to read Mariani's book, despite my interest in Hopkins, after reading a negative review in the NYRB. Bailey makes the same criticism that had put me off: "I guess it's not imperative for biographers to dwell on their subjects' sexual inclinations, though most would agree it's kind of crucial in Hopkins's case, and Mariani is almost coy on that point."

After seeing the exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, the first major showing of the artist’s oeuvre in New York in over thirty years, at the Brooklyn Museum (through July 5), I want to know more about the man...

2009.04.12

Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World

While the Swedish Parliament was legalizing same-sex marriage and Iowa Supreme Court was quietly and unanimously ruling that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry in the State, I was reading Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World (Giulia Sissa, translated by George Staunton, Yale University Press, 2008, 224p).

Giulia Sissa is a professor of Classics and Political Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles. As her profile in the UCLA website states, she is "the author of numerous books and articles on the history, anthropology and philosophy of the ancient world. Her interest for the past is always connected to major contemporary issues, such as feminism, sexuality, addiction, democratic theory, utopian thinking, and political emotions."

Sex and Sensuality was first released in Italy in 2003. A French translation is to be published by Odile Jacob. It not always easy to follow Sissa's reasoning. She claims that pleasure and desire between men and women were central in the Ancient World, from Greek classic period to early Christendom ("The division of the sexes and their coming together formed the nucleus of ancient reflections on sexuality"). Sensuality, "the moving of those different bodies towards each other, in the pursuit of pleasure," "indefinite, lingering, persistent desire," is "desire to be desired, longing for reciprocity."

If we admit to this, we free ourselves from many dilemmas that unsettle historian of sexuality. Firstly, this jettisons the opposition between passivity and activity: the distinction between the person who aspire to possess an object and the object itself is undermined. According to the dialectics of sensuality, we yearn to be an object of attraction to another, and, if we are desired, we will reciprocate. This is the game of chărízeĩn or gratification, on which the Platonic debate on love has focused: the moment of delight in seduction comes when a person wins  another person's erotic interest. This also diminishes the dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality: sensuality is feminine, whatever the gender of the person who experiences it. It is a boy or an adult cinaedus who shoots the darts because they have feminine bodies. It is the woman who dominates the love scene because she is the archetype, and because, as Ovid says, adult femininity can provide superior erotic response.

The attitude of the Greeks towards sex between men and youths is discussed mainly through Aeschines' speech Against Timarchus and Plato's Symposium. This attitude, argues Sissa, "depends on the social environment, and changes radically between the rarefied world of the enlightened aristocracy and that of the ordinary Athenians." The importance of 'homosexuality' has been over-emphasized. As it is, Sissa's choice for the book jacket, Jean-Baptiste Regnault's Socrates Drags Alcibiades from the Arms of Voluptuous Pleasure (1791), is puzzling...

Does it make the Ancien World closer to our World?

***

If your are hesitating whether or not to read The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Littell, Harper, 2009, 992p) which has just been translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, take a look at Daniel Mendelsohn's review in the New York Review of Books, Transgression. It is by far the best review I have read on the book. Le Monde has called it the most authoritative (Les Bienveillantes malmenées: les critiques cherchent à comprendre pourquoi le livre a eu un tel accueil en France).

2009.04.05