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
