Desire and Time in Modern English Fiction: 1919–2017 9780367488765, 9781003044161

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Desire and Time in Modern English Fiction: 1919–2017

Beginning with Somerset Maugham’s innovative, sexually dissident South Seas novel and tales and Alfred Hitchcock’s gay-inflected revisiting of the Jack the Ripper sensation in silent film, this book considers the continuing presence of the past in future-oriented work of the 1930s and the Second World War by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and the playwright and novelist, Patrick Hamilton. The final three chapters carry the discussion to the present in analyses of works by lesbian, postcolonial, and gay authors such as Sarah Waters, Amitav Ghosh, and Alan Hollinghurst. Focusing on questions about temporality and changes in gender and sexuality, especially gay and lesbian, straight and queer, following the rejection of the Victorian patriarchal marriage model, this study examines the continuing influence of late Victorian, Aestheticist, and Decadent culture in Modernist writing and its permutations in England. Richard Dellamora is a widely published author on dissident male and female sexuality in Victorian and twentieth-century literature, including Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Radclyffe Hall, A Life in the Writing (2011) among other studies and edited collections. Dellamora is Professor Emeritus in the departments of English and Cultural Studies and Fellow of the Centre for Theory, Politics, and Culture at Trent University. He currently lives and continues to write in Santa Monica, California. Dellamora completed an A. B. at Dartmouth College; B. A. at Queens’ College, Cambridge; and Ph.D. (English) at Yale University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and a Publication Grant in 2004 and has been awarded several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grants.

Among the Victorians and Modernists Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered. The Ethical Vision of George Eliot Thomas Albrecht Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women Echoes of the Past Miriam Borham-Puyal Desire and Time in Modern English Fiction: 1919–2017 Richard Dellamora Catherine Crowe Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics Ruth Heholt Peril and Protection in British Courtship Novels A Study in Continuity and Change Geri Giebel Chavis For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035

Desire and Time in Modern English Fiction: 1919–2017

Richard Dellamora

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Richard Dellamora to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-48876-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04416-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction 1 1 Modernity and Degeneration in Somerset Maugham and Paul Gauguin: The Moon and Sixpence and the South Sea Tales 22 2 Haunting the West End: Oscar Wilde and Silent Hitchcock 46 3 History and Revolution in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show 65 4 Pathological Legacies: Patriarchy in Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes 88 5 “A New Space of Time”: Determining the Future in The Years

118

6 Sexual Politics and Blackout in Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square

141

7 George Orwell, Futurity, and Male Homosexual Panic 164 8 Queering Past—and Future—in Sarah Waters’ Affinity

187

vi Contents

9 Ecological Time and Social Desire in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

206

Index

251

Acknowledgments

In developing a book over several years, one depends on different individuals at different times. Lindsay Martin and Martha Vicinus were frequent interlocutors early on. Most recently, readers and editors including Nancy Paxton, Ellen McCallum, Victoria Rosner, and Doug Mao helped in the final shaping of the book. I became interested in temporality in the 1990s while editing Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End and writing Apocalyptic Overtures, a collection of essays dealing with fiction written in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. In the years since then, questions of temporality have become central to gay and queer theory in works such as Lee Edelman’s No Future and Judith Halberstam’s In A Queer Time and Place. Most recently, my thinking about temporality has been informed by Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon Is Now? and Jesse Matz’s Modernist Time Ecology. In sexuality and gender studies, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, volumes 1 and 2, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men have continued to be essential. My thinking about historical time has been informed by Friedrich Nietzsche’s typology of history in Untimely Meditations and Michel de Certeau’s critique of historical periodization in The Writing of History. Given the focus of this book on the interleaving of Victorian with modern time in twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction, it has been encouraging to see the convergence since 2000 of studies in Aestheticism and the Decadence with early twentieth-century Modernist Studies, most notably in Vincent Sherry’s Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, as well as in books by younger scholars like Robert Stilling and edited texts such as Kate Hext and Alex Murray’s collection, Decadence in the Age of Modernism. In individual chapters on particular authors, Ann Banfield on phenomenological time in Virginia Woolf and Alex Woloch on rhetoric in George Orwell’s writing have been very helpful. My thanks are due to the Chair and members of the Department of English at UCLA, where much of this book was researched and written. For the responses of listeners who have heard portions of the text

viii Acknowledgments presented at various conferences, I am grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Michelle Salyga, my editor at Routledge, for her enthusiastic encouragement of this project as well as to Bryony Reece and Karthikeyan Subramaniam for shepherding the manuscript through copy edit to completion. Santa Monica, California May 2020

Introduction

Desire and Time in Modern English Fiction: 1919–2017 pursues a double trajectory. One is a study of twentieth-century English fiction that projects the future as an object of desire, be it averse or beckoning. The other is to consider how the late Victorian repudiation of domestic patriarchy results in attempts to rethink gender and intimacy in twentieth- century writing. The reference to 2017, the date of publication of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, The Sparsholt Affair, in the title of this book indicates that the significance of the word modern is not limited to the years 1900–1950, the dates which are usually associated with the literary period called modernism in England.1 Although the inclusion of Hollinghurst’s metamodernist text can be justified on the basis that he has long been writing novels that make self-conscious use of key elements of literary modernism, my argument for a wider use of the term “modern” is not limited to its use in order to refer to a particular literary movement or movements or to work ongoing or in time present. The present in work considered here always involves the past and usually the future as well. For example, the three final chapters of this book deal with novels published since 1999. Although written in different genres (neo-Victorian pastiche, postcolonial novel, and metamodernist fiction), each of them engages time and literary form both prior to the modern movement and following it. 2 Among the relevant points of reference are the emergence in the twentieth century of writing of both male and female same-sex desire that would be inconceivable in the absence of late nineteenth-century sexology and Freudian psychoanalysis but also, and just as significantly, the lesbian, gay, and queer movement politics of the 1960s and later.3 In a memorable passage from The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault writes: “There is no question that the appearance in the nineteenth century of a whole series of discourses on… homosexuality… made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.”4

2 Introduction D. H. Lawrence was among the most radical sexual and political writers of his time. Taking the genre of free verse as his point of departure, in the essay “Poetry in the Present” (1928), he argues the connections that he perceived to exist between literary experimentation, time scales, and the articulation of embodied desire. His essay on free verse offers an excellent point of departure for thinking about the temporal dimensions of modern art. Moreover, his celebration of an embodied masculine present moment in poetry occurs at the end of a decade marked by continuing mourning over the deaths and injuries experienced by over a million young Britons in World War I. Lawrence first considers the work of time in two classic Romantic lyrics—John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” Lawrence reads Keats’s poem as grounded in past trauma just as a reader today might see the celebration of masculine vitality in Lawrences’s essay as offering recompense for the physical and psychical losses of the War. The trauma that Keats has in view is the rape of Philomela by Tereus in Greek mythology and the consequent murder of his young son Itys by Procne, Philomela’s sister and Tereus’ wife. In the myth, the three adults are subsequently turned into birds: Tereus a hawk, Philomela a nightingale, and Procne a swallow. Keats’s poem is inspired by the “plaintive anthem” (l. 75) that he hears in the song of a nightingale. In contrast, in Shelley’s poem, the skylark’s “profuse strains of unpremeditated art” are “conveyed in exquisite form” suggestive of a “glimmering futurity” (78).5 To Lawrence “it seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity” (77). For Lawrence, “poetry is, as a rule, either the voice of the far future, exquisite and ethereal, or it is the voice of the past, rich, magnificent” (77). Lawrence, whose own poetry is free in form, then shifts to what he sees as the unique temporal dimension of free verse, namely its attempt to express the experience of being in the present: “Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now” (78). Lawrence brings to this moment an emphasis on poetry as a form of physical embodiment. The body in question is male: “free verse is, or should be direct utterance of the instant, the whole man” (80). And it is orgasmic, expressing the moment of coming: “in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment” (81). In identifying an exemplar of this work, Lawrence refers not to a contemporary but to a nineteenth-century poet and not to an Englishman but to an American, Walt Whitman, and in this way indicates the special gift that the voice of Whitman brings to English poetry from Swinburne onward.6 “Such is the rare new poetry. One realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery

Introduction  3 we have hardly recognized: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse: Whitman. Now we know” (82).7 When used as a literary term, the word “modern” works differently from others used to name a period of time. For example, used as a period reference, the word “Victorian” refers to a specific chronological time and hence is delimited. It begins in 1837 with the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne and ends at the time of her death in 1901. The term modern, however, is self-referential; it refers to what Lawrence calls “momentaneity” (78). Its primary reference is ontological and epistemological. In my previous work, I have often used period designations; but they tend to be chronological and, hence, belong to a world of causeeffect relations. The term modern, however, refers directly to experience in time, to instantaneity. But what does the word modern mean when used as a historical descriptor? The French historiographer Michel de Certeau describes the concept of periodicity as one that attempts to constitute an absolute divide between the period that it instates and what comes before. Arguing that “modern Western history essentially begins with differentiation between the present and the past,” he critiques what he sees as the ambition within historiography to subject what falls within its purview to the rule of a universal reason.8 The divide needs to be absolute in order for the historian to be able to posit the past as an other which can be reconstituted as an object of study and tamed within contemporary disciplinarity. The present needs the past as an other by means of which the present can define its own difference from and superiority. It is difficult or impossible, however, to imagine a contemporary text which is unmarked by what precedes it. Far from being quarantined as a result of a period division, the past continues to inhabit the present and despite all efforts to affirm its alterity. I refer to the presence of past material in self-consciously modern material as “braiding.” However, the period of the present is orientated not only to its past but also to an as yet unknown future. In an early essay, The Use and Abuse of History (1874), Friedrich Nietzsche contended that “we need” history “for the sake of life and action.”9 History, including its braided present, leans toward the future. In this perspective, the now that we identify with the present is triune—explicitly or implicitly engaging both the past and the future. Later in the book, de Certeau subjects this initial polarity to a deconstructive turn. The topics of historiography at any given point in time result from the particular “situation” (35, 44) in which the historian— and the discourse of his discipline—are located.10 Despite the prescribed limit between life and death, the study of the past is always inhabited by present practice within the discipline; likewise, the situation of

4 Introduction historiography is constituted in part by the previous practice of historiography and in that way by the past. The breaks or divisions are heuristic fictions. For many of the writers considered in Desire and Time in Modern Fiction, this doubled habitation of the past by the present and vice-versa is further complicated by the fact that, having been born before Victoria’s death, although modern, many of the authors considered here have been Victorian, a prior experience that continues in memory. The “braiding” of Victorian with modernist culture is especially complex because of the prominence of Aestheticism and the Decadence in both late Victorian and twentieth-century culture. Aestheticism and the Decadence constitute a counter-cultural movement within Victorian art and culture that is hostile to the aesthetic of middle-class realism prominent in the Victorian novel. In English departments in the United States following World War II, Aestheticist and Decadent writing fit awkwardly into the final one or two weeks of undergraduate courses in Victorian poetry and prose. The poetry was minor and often by women, and the prose was not much more substantial than Robert Louis Stevenson’s historical adventure stories. And Oscar Wilde, the one outstanding literary figure along with Walter Pater, did his best work for the theater. Moreover, Wilde was an iconoclast, sexual pervert, and convicted criminal who ended his life in impoverished exile. Among modernist literary critics such as F. R. Leavis in England in the 1930s, Wilde and Pater epitomized literary and cultural decadence in a negative sense of the word.11 Aestheticism and the Decadence, moreover, were un-Victorian in their cosmopolitanism. Aestheticist and Decadent writers admired the young poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who sought to become “a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of the senses.”12 They admired the short stories of Edgar Alan Poe and the homoerotic poetry of Walt Whitman; they promoted the á rebours tradition in French writing from Théophile Gautier to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and later writers such as Pierre Louÿs, and G. K. Huysmans. And they read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.13 To the embarrassment of pedagogues like Leavis and I.  A.  Richards, decadent style, imagery, and thematics, moreover, exercised a major influence on Anglo-American modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot in “The Wasteland” and Ezra Pound.14 The same is true of the early fiction of D. H. Lawrence and William Faulkner. Modernist writers in England capitalized, so to speak, on the thought and writing of American and Continental Decadents. As Kate Hext argues in the Introduction to Decadence and the Age of Modernism (2019), the Decadent tradition continued in the twentieth century in both Modernist and anti-Modernist writers, including, in the latter group, the Sapphist Vernon Lee. As Hext points out, there is often no clear line of demarcation between a twentieth-century anti-modernist Decadent writer and a self-consciously modernist writer such as Eliot. Hext concludes: “Alongside the literary phenomenon we

Introduction  5 imperfectly call modernism, decadence persisted as a distinct tradition that cannot easily or desirably be brought under the umbrella of modernism…. It is time now not only to revisit the composition of the modernist canon, which is being done, but also to address literary works that are not within (and should not be forced into) that canon”  (9). Since the mid-1990s there has been efflorescence of critical studies located at the intersection of modernism and decadence. Most recently, Robert Stilling has analyzed the appropriation of decadent tropes and thematics in the poetry of the mid-twentieth–century Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe.15 Achebe’s work and that of other African poets suggest that disillusionment with the progress narratives of government in the new postcolonial nation-states is often expressed by adapting to contemporary purposes a Euro-American decadent rhetoric familiar since the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the silent films of Alfred Hitchcock provide a case in point of the combination of avant-garde film technique with late Victorian decadent material. The Lodger (1927), his first important film, is based on the 1906 novel of the same title by Marie Belloc Lowndes, which fictionalizes the Jack the Ripper sensation of the late 1880s. As Michael Wood points out, the squalid setting, misogyny, and terror of this series of murders in London’s East End provide a subliminal point of reference for subsequent thrillers by Hitchcock.16 Moreover, Hitchcock adds a titillating hint of criminal perversity of the Oscar-Wilde type by casting the handsome, openly gay, young musical star, Ivor Novello, in the lead of this film and its follow up, Downhill (1927). Combining the Ripper murders with the memory of Wilde successfully linked damaged celebrity with (homo)sexual perversity, and crime.17 The linkages continue in Rope (1948), Hitchcock’s Cold War adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play of the same title, in which a pair of wealthy gay young men enact the thrill killing of an attractive heterosexual male acquaintance. Again, Hitchcock chose a young gay actor, Farley Granger, to play one of the two leads.18 In heterosexual thrillers too, Hitchcock continued to enjoy the glamor and subliminal titillation to be secured by employing gay-inflected stars such as Cary Grant. Wood argues that even when Grant plays the role of heterosexual lead in a film like Suspicion (1941), Hitchcock attaches an aura of murderous sexual ambiguity to Grant’s fictional persona.19 In this book, I define the Victorian period in nominalist terms as occurring in the years between 1837 and 1901. The modern writers considered in this book, however, define the period much more along the line of division that de Certeau suggests. Woolf divides time similarly in her fiction, periodical publication, and autobiographical essays. In the opening paragraph of the chapter on “Sex and Sexualities” in The Modern Movement, Chris Baldick provides a classic instance of early twentieth- (and

6 Introduction twenty-first) century views of the antithetical relationship between what he calls “Victorianism” and “the fully modern experience.” The abandonment of ‘Victorian’ reticence and euphemism in sexual matters was at the heart of the fully modern experience. One of the legendary episodes in the Bloomsbury Group’s self-emancipation from Victorianism involves the discovery of sex-talk as a liberatory release. Woolf’s memoir, “Old Bloomsbury,” written in 1922 but not publishable until 1976, recounts a breakthrough in the conversational norms of her social circle, which seems to have occurred in 1909, if at all (Woolf confesses that this may have been an ‘invented’ memory): Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed a finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress. 20 “Semen?” he said. Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good. It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long.21 Baldick’s first sentence balances between ‘Victorian’ and modern. The fact that the former appears in single quotation marks indicates that the reference is general, even notional. It is assumed that the reader already knows what ‘Victorian’ means. But where does this assurance come from? Namely from his or her knowledge of “modern experience,” which, in Baldick’s context, means that of the members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf herself, the leading English writer of modernist fiction. For postmodernists and readers of the twenty-first century, the idea of Victorian experience and, even more, of “Victorianism,” is largely shaped by the intervening figures whom we call “modern.”22 Nonetheless, it is worth keeping in mind that English modernist writers lived as Victorians during their formative years. They knew (or suffered) themselves as Victorians before they became modernists. And their Victorian past continued to ghost them. De Certeau suggests that the writing of history replaced the traditional representations of myth and of ritual that gave authority to the present…. In its most elementary form, writing is equivalent to constructing a sentence by going over an apparently blank surface, a page. But isn’t historiography also an activity that recommences from the point of a new time, which is separated from

Introduction  7 the ancients, and which takes charge of the construction of a rationality within this new time? It appears to me that in the West, for the last four centuries, ‘the making of history’ has referred to writing. Little by little it has replaced the myths of yesterday with a practice of meaning. As a practice (and not by virtue of the discourses that are its result) it symbolizes a society capable of managing the space that it provides for itself, of replacing the obscurity of the lived body with the expression of a ‘will to know’ or a ‘will to dominate’ the body…. This practice of history is an ambitious, progressive, also utopian practice that is linked to the endless institution of areas ‘proper,’ where a will to power can be inscribed in terms of reason. It has the value of a scientific model. (5–6) When Walter Benjamin resorts in contrast to literary forms such as parable and allegorical metaphor in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he does so in order to repudiate this view both of history and of what in the “Theses” he refers to as “homogeneous, empty time,” that is, time—and space—subject to human control and direction. 23 Two literary forms that well suit the model of “scientific” history that de Certeau outlines are the genres of the chronicle novel, whose chapter and section divisions are often marked by dates, and the genealogical novel.24 Genealogical fiction, familiar in the mid-Victorian period, charts time by its sequence within individual families. Moving away from the focus on design that characterizes Woolf’s novels of the 1920s and early 1930s as modernist, in The Years (1937) she chose instead to update the genres of chronicle and genealogical fiction. The Pargiters, the first long division of the novel, provides a narrative about a number of sisters raised in an upper-middle class family in Victorian London. In The Pargiters, Woolf attempts to modernize the genres by adopting the form of what she calls the “novel-essay.”25 In this section, domestic chronology is supplemented by essays that analyze character and action from the vantage of modern feminist critique. As Woolf wrote, however, she found it possible to articulate a contemporary point of view within a conventional narrative structure. In the novel as published, Woolf’s treatment of chronology and genealogy are more radical. The dates used to entitle chapters at times have little bearing either on the history of members of the family or with reference to significant events in twentieth-century British history. And important times such as the decade of the 1920s not to mention the General Strike of 1926 are elided. The lack of these markers implicitly prompts question about the very significance of public chronology; does it at times merely mark sequence with no evident inherent meaning or with little or no relevance to domestic living? Another question is whether time may be inherently without significance or whether, to use a term that Benjamin borrows from his

8 Introduction knowledge of Jewish mysticism, the present moment can be perceived at times as full of potential for the transformation of history.26 With reference to literary genres, an affirmative answer to this question implies the inadequacy of naturalism, the dominant form of novelistic fiction in early twentieth-century England. In naturalistic fiction, time functions as a series of causes and effects in an unbroken series. The sequence is determined by the factors of environment and heredity—as they do, for example, in Somerset Maugham’s first published novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897). In some modernist art—and in critical theory as practiced by Benjamin and others such as Alain Badiou, the moment is understood differently as indeterminate in its possibility, including the possibility of issuing in something radically new.27 Change in such a moment is envisaged as potentially both psychical and world-altering. In a number of novels considered here—Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936) for one, and The Years itself—the sense of time as open is indicated by the author’s decision to provide the novel with a double ending, one positive, the other apocalyptic. Woolf’s novel ends with what appears to be a celebration of the intimate tie that binds the members of a young unidentified heterosexual couple. But the novel also ends with an incoherent attempt by a displaced Russian Jewish intellectual to call his fellows to work together toward a utopian future. Using the conversion experience of St. Paul as an example, in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Badiou speaks of what he calls “event,” a momentary experience like Paul’s conversion which can transform not only the psyche of an individual but also their apprehension of meaning and the possibility of action within the world in which one lives. In English modernism, the perception of event acquired a habitation in time and space specifically in the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions of 1910–1911 and 1912), Roger Fry’s exhibitions of modernist art, which included work by Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Gauguin. In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf, who served for a time as secretary of the first exhibition, 28 speaks of the sense of release from the Victorian past into the potentiality of a now that inspired him, his future wife, Virginia, her sister, Vanessa Bell, and other members of Bloomsbury. Woolf says in his memoirs that these events made it exciting to be alive in London in 1911…. It looked for a moment as if militarism, imperialism, and antisemitism were on the run…. Profound changes were taking place in every direction, not merely politically and socially. The revolution of the motor car and the aeroplane had begun; Freud and Rutherford and Einstein were at work beginning to revolutionize our knowledge of our own minds and the universe. Equally exciting things were happening in the arts…. In painting we were in the middle of the profound revolution of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso…. And to crown all, night after

Introduction  9 night we flocked to Covent Garden, entranced by a new art, a revelation to us benighted British, the Russian Ballet in the greatest days of Diaghilev and Nijinsky.29 The possibility that such times do exist provides one of the through lines of this book. In Chapter 4 and elsewhere, including the final chapter, I begin to trace a sequence of events that indicate how the Woolfs and others not only worked to bring about individual, social, and political transformation but also kept alive this sense in dark times. During Woolf’s career, philosophic thinking about time was dominated in England by the movement known as Cambridge epistemology, including Woolf’s interlocutor, Bertrand Russell. Basing their theoretical work on the discovery in physics of the atomic and sub-atomic structure of reality, Russell and his fellows rejected subjective experience as illusory, a position which, among other things, rendered art and art-making noncognitive. As I discuss in Chapters 4 and 5, Woolf responded to his challenge by basing style and structure in her work on the experience of embodied consciousness, hence the concept of moments of being.30 The modern field of phenomenology affords means within philosophy to counter Russell’s position. Woolf, however, appears to have arrived at her position primarily by means of her self-conscious approach to writing. Clive Bell, for one, doubted that Woolf had read the work of the influential phenomenologist Henri Bergson.31 In Chapter 4, I trace what I understand to be Woolf’s attempt to theorize the meaning of human experience in time in autobiographical writing that was published only a generation after her death. She does so by analyzing early sense-experience and efforts at thinking—including her reaction to sexual interference that she underwent at an early age. In the diary and in The Years she attempts to do so by the way in which she writes individual sentences and frames particular passages. Some of these, such as the one at the end of “1914” in which she traces Lady Lasswade’s long walk up a forested hill, draw upon innovations in silent film such as the cut and montage.32 German-language film theorists in the 1920s such as Béla Balázs developed a phenomenological approach to analyze these and other cinematic techniques. Woolf’s keen interest in work presented by the London Film Society suggests that this new art form and its critical discourse contributed to her thinking about experience in time.33 As important as the challenges posed by Cambridge epistemology were assumptions that Woolf shared with Freudian psychoanalysis. Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner both follow the same course that the German social theorist Max Horkheimer observed in the psychoanalytic method fashioned by Freud at the fin de siècle. For Horkheimer, Freud’s case studies exemplify the late Victorian “decline of the family and the individual.”34 Freud, however, later pursued this crisis beyond

10 Introduction the limits of psychological or sociological description by postulating the concepts of libido and the death drive, primal desires which resist being structured within conventional psychological and social forms. These ideas were to become axioms basic to modernist art and its aesthetic ideology. Horkheimer argues that the shift in Freud’s focus from the psychoanalytic session to metapsychology in post-World War I texts such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920; trans.1922) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) occurred in response to what he perceived to be “the depth and severity of modern man’s destructive urges” as exposed during the War (Jay, 103). Melanie Klein’s theory of guilt and reparation, although based on her analytical work with infants, was grounded in a similar perspective on human action. Although she gentles writing that she directed to fellow psychoanalysts and social workers, the basic psychical mechanism that Klein is exploring is sado-masochistic. Writers of the mid-1930s and early 1940s, whether sympathetic, skeptical, or antagonistic to Klein’s work such as Woolf, George Orwell, and Hamilton, focus on this dynamic in the individual, in interpersonal relations, and in group psychology, especially within authoritarian regimes. Klein’s imprint like Hitchcock’s is particularly evident in works by Hamilton such as his West End melodramas, Gaslight (1938), and Hangover Square (1941), a thriller whose troubled sexual politics figure the debasement of the individual within Fascist regimes. Ditto the homoerotic sadosmasochism traced by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). If Chapter 4 indicates the continuing impact of patriarchy, Chapter 7 focuses on this legacy in the form of the panic of straight men in the face of possible homosexual contamination. In referring to what she calls “male homosexual panic,” Sedgwick has in mind fiction by James and Dickens, 35 but the continuing importance of male boarding schools in England ensured that the condition would continue into the twentieth century with devastating implications for both same- and opposite-sex relations among those affected. Maugham’s often overlooked short story, “Neil Macadam,” shows how destructive sexual panic could be to both men and women when the chaste love of a young researcher for his supervisor is threatened by the physical and emotional needs of his mentor’s displaced White Russian wife. Signs of this sort of panic are endemic in Orwell’s fiction and nonfiction alike. In recent decades, Orwell has come into disrepute as a result of the homophobia that marks his work.36 Thanks to a key piece of posthumously published writing, however, it is possible to establish the basis of this attitude in his childhood experience at school. In “Such, Such Were the Joys” Orwell’s memoir of his early experiences at St. Cyprian’s, he describes the sexual and emotional violence that he was subjected to by his Headmaster and his wife, “Flip,” or Mrs. Wilkes.37 Falsely accused of being involved in a circle of sexual play with other boys,

Introduction  11 Orwell responded in a panic from which he never recovered. Across a variety of genres, he repeatedly invites his (male) readers to share his scorn for effeminate men. Just as evident is his spontaneous, chaste love for physically attractive young working-class men. Whether the object of Orwell’s gaze and pen be a miner in the north of England or the member of a revolutionary militia in Spain in 1937, the onset of this intense desire is always matched in Orwell’s prose by a need to establish a distance between the man in question and himself. The final three chapters of the book deal with novels published since 1999 which indicate how changing forms of intimacy, including the creation of socialities based on the recognition of minority sexual identities, have changed literature. Frequently, however, recent writing continues to reach back to the Victorian period when these identities were first defined. The tone of Sarah Waters’ novel, Affinity (1999), recalls the despondency and suicidal depression of lesbian romance fiction of the 1950s, 38 but the novel itself is cast in the mode of Victorian pastiche, that is, as a fiction set in the past and written in a Victorian idiom but without contemporary interruptions such as occur in A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). Waters’ novel includes narrative by two subjects of female same-sex desire, one, Margaret Prior, a highly educated middle-class woman who fails in her attempt to achieve the sort of compromise between heterosexual marriage and intense, even sexual, female friendship that Martha Vicinus describes in Intimate Friends. The second, lower-class woman, Selina Dawes, an emotionally and possibly sexually abused young woman, has found that survival requires her to form an alliance with a “mannish” female criminal. At the end of the novel, ­Waters ­includes a letter from Margaret to Helen, her former female lover, whom Margaret hopes will be able to respond with understanding to Margaret’s desperate situation. The address of this letter, however, is open to contemporary readers who have seen desire between women legitimated in the present. The second recent work is Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, which addresses the urgent topic of ecological time. Focusing attention not only on members of several generations but also on the efforts of Britons, Indians, and a second-generation Indo-American marine biologist to create and maintain an agricultural trust on behalf of landless Dalits on a tidal island at the mouth of the Ganges, the novel expands the reach of genealogical fiction from the domestic into the political and social sphere. The women who continue this project today are, in effect, single. A shared common goal draws them together and fosters their intimacy. Their action is motivated by what may be called social desire, i. e., a shared goal in community service that draws them together and fosters their intimacy.39 The novel’s focus on women whose lives are given meaning in this way is familiar in fiction and personal narrative by women in England during

12 Introduction and following World War II. Barbary Pym’s novels of single women whose lives center on parish service offer one example. The interest of these women in men is a minor distraction from their ongoing friendship and service with other women. One finds a similar pattern too in autobiographical work such as Vere Hodgson’s War diary.40 Hodgson’s narrative is grounded in female homosocial desire.41 Through the course of the diary, these linkages ramify and strengthen despite the shortages and dangers of London in wartime. Although set in present time, The Hungry Tide traces the history of the trust from its origin in late Victorian philanthropy through the twentieth century including the massacre that followed an unauthorized migration of Dalits to the island of Morichjhãpi in the Sundarban archipelago in 1978 and 1979. Written in the contemporary genre of the postcolonial novel, Ghosh’s work nonetheless contains strong traditional elements. In particular, the tale is structured along the lines of classic Whig historical narrative as analyzed by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel (1937). Postcolonial fiction, however, is usually based on a prior theoretical and historical rejection of this form of historical narrative together with its optimistic view of liberal middle-class individualism. Ghosh’s view of heterosexual desire is also conventional. Near the end of the novel he draws on animist spirituality in order to rationalize a transformational change in the principal transmitter of the history of the trust, Kanai Dutt. Following a mystical experience, Dutt abandons his upper-middle-class urban life style and womanizing ways in favor of supporting the work of the women at Lusibari. This change, however, is not altogether convincing. Time and Desire in Modern Fiction ends with a study of the fiction of the contemporary writer, Alan Hollinghurst, especially as it touches upon interracial sexual ties between males in England over the past century. Geoff Dyer has suggested that Hollinghurst’s fiction dating from the publication of The Swimming-Pool Library (1989) onward has outlined the history of gay sociality in England since the late eighteenth century.42 Nowhere is this process more evident than in The Stranger’s Child (2011), Hollinghurst’s Jamesian study of a century-long struggle among family members, politicians, straight admirers, gay men, and an opportunistic biographer in order to shape and control the legacy of the fictional poet, Cecil Vance. Hollinghurst’s representation of Valance is based on a detailed knowledge of Brooke’s poetry and biography. The chapter ends with a meditation upon the bifurcation in English culture today between a country whose social and political life is shaped both by what Paul Gilroy calls white nationalist “postcolonial melancholia” and the jouissance that he experiences in the multi-racial, multi-sexual society that he observes in London today.

Introduction  13 Time can be defined as a property of objects in motion in space, a scientific definition that negates claims for the significance of time in terms of personal consciousness, intimacy, and the timelines of human relationships. In the early twentieth century, there was a reaction, both in Bergson’s philosophy and in the writing of modernist writers such as Proust and Woolf, who reject the “homogeneous empty time” of modern physics. Woolf refers instead to individual consciousness of existing in time as the experience of “moments of being.”43 For Proust and Woolf, experience in the present contains within it the work of memory as well as awareness, implicit or explicit, of the merging of present with future time. Bergson argued that experience in the present “must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future.”44 Time has been an important conceptual category in the theory of sexual dissidence. In queer theory in the twenty-first century, this theorizing has taken on a decidedly phenomenological character.45 However, the single most influential theorist of temporality in gay and queer studies continues to be Lee Edelman, whose view of the sexual subject combines Althusserian and Lacanian perspectives. In No Future, Edelman argues that in mid-twentieth century mass culture (for example, in film thrillers by Alfred Hitchcock) male homosexuals are castigated as subject to what, following Lacan, Edelman refers to as the death drive as a result of their rejection of the ‘normal’ trajectory of heterosexual development, namely marriage and parenting. Reversing homophobic discourse, Edelman counters by affirming the political value of rejecting normalcy. Phenomenological queer critics have found themselves subsequently wrestling with Edelman’s formulations. In queer theory there has been strong emphasis—as in Woolf’s work—on the cognitive character of experience in the present tense. One of the most useful reflections on queer temporality occurs in the writing of Carolyn Dinshaw, a historian as well as a literary critic and queer theorist. In How Soon Is Now?, she argues the crucial importance of present time as the portal whereby queer immanence can become positive actuality. Dinshaw takes as her point of departure the lyrics of the song, “How Soon Is Now?” by Morrissey, the frontman of the rock band, the Smiths. In the song, Morissey imagines the loneliness of the “I” as the subject of unreciprocated desire in the scene of a Mancunian dance club. Sexual satisfaction in this setting is at best fleeting, the present fugitive, its moments always either not yet or already in the past. For Morissey, while sex may promise jouissance, it is in fact blank, neither here nor there. Dinshaw responds to this nihilism by countering that time in the present is experienced in multiple ways, hence is not empty. And the “voice whose desire requires, even demands, another kind of time beyond…

14 Introduction l­inearity, empty and homogeneous, is a queer voice” (4). Dinshaw explores many instances, both sexual and textual, in which disparate experiences of time incur in the same space. She ripostes both to Morissey’s lyric persona and to José Muñoz, a cultural critic who devalues the present in favor of what he calls a queer future. Muñoz avers that queerness “is primarily about futurity and hope.”46 Dinshaw attempts instead to “open ordinary time frames to the multiplicities within,” a condition that she terms “asynchrony.”47 This framework will at times include domestic partnerships and family-building, but its intersecting temporalities will mean that family in this space will not be self-enclosed. Dinshaw draws attention to the simultaneous existence of multiple temporalities in the experience of the present moment. Religious writing is especially receptive to imagining such moments since Divine time is time in which past, present, and future are understood to exist in an eternal Now.48 Dinshaw studies similar moments of the experience of divine presence in human life in writing by Medieval and Early Modern mystics such as the outspoken Margery Kempe. While researching the papers of Hope Emily Allen, an editor of Kempe’s autobiography, first at Bryn Mawr College and subsequently in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Dinshaw came across instances of what she describes as “queer intimacy” (126) in Allen’s papers and in particular in letters of condolence that Allen “had written to her closest English friend, Dorothy Ellis, on the death of her companion, Mary Caroline Mackaig, known as Skay” (125). Reading the letters, Dinshaw suddenly recognized herself to be experiencing, in relation to Allen’s writing, feelings congruent with those which Allen expressed to her friend. In the moment, Dinshaw “felt a shock of recognition—and, more intensely, the shock of being recognized” (125). In Desire and Time the effective past is usually Victorian. In History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction, Kate Mitchell argues that novels set in the Victorian period such as Affinity contribute to the modern attempt “to invent a genealogy of lesbian desire.”49 As such, they may be thought of as analogous with the interpretive self-reflexivity practiced by academic historians who bring contemporary knowledge, concerns, and interests to bear in analyzing artifacts of the past. In this way, historians provide insights into past events that would not have been available at an earlier date.50 Waters’ practice of historical fiction combines this double historical work in a single text that includes knowledge of historical materials. In Affinity, for example, Waters demonstrates detailed knowledge of the floor plan of Millbank Prison as described in Henry Mayhew’s The Criminal Prisons of London (1862). Mayhew’s book remains an important referent, literally and metaphorically, for the action of the novel. Selina and Margaret are fictional personages. But their situation, emotions, and affects may be analogous with those

Introduction  15 actually experienced at Millbank and the charity workers who visited them. In an essay written jointly with Laura Doan, Waters argues that “the aim” of neo-Victorian fiction is “not to accurately depict the past in deference to history’s authoritative discourse, but rather to invent a past that links to the present; Lesbian imagining ‘recruits the reader into a community of shared lesbian interests understood to extend across history, and across the border separating history from fiction.’ Moreover, since evidence is scarce, it ‘offers fantasy and wishful thinking as legitimate historiographical resources, necessary correctives of missing links to the impoverished lesbian archive.’”51 Finally, it is worth keeping in mind that Margaret and her peers at the time did on occasion have other alternatives. Margaret’s sense of isolation and entrapment following the death of her supportive father did not necessarily imply a future as the embittered spinster daughter and eventual caregiver of a conventional mother. For women of Margaret’s class in Britain and North America, it was not unusual for two female companions to become life partners—on the condition, of course, that one or both enjoyed a measure of economic independence. Such ties were called Boston marriages.52 Also worth keeping in mind is the fact that the reader of Desire and Time experiences intimacy in the past moment in the very action of reading now. Intimacy is experienced in the relation of oneself to a text, a text that in itself includes intimate ties of its own: between words and images, to the writer who produced the text, to the readers whom s/he had in mind at the time of writing, and to later readers. In this sense, a textual Now compresses and expands time: present, past, and future. Byatt’s Possession (1990) is a heterosexual neo-Victorian novel in the form of a historical metaficition: that is, it includes a pastiche of Victorian writing in various genres within the frame of a late twentieth-­century fiction. For Byatt, both a contemporary love affair and the attempt to recover one from the past are the primary drivers of the action. Byatt, however, emphasizes that the pleasure of the text can be equal to the intense response that writing itself can prompt.53 “It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex.” Recalling Proust’s style, she continues: “Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading.” 54 Being pleasured as a reader carries with it a temporality: the present is experienced as Now-time in relation to the particular words that appear in the text in their full range of philological, literary, biographical, and autobiographical meanings. Past time too is contained in this

16 Introduction compression, which includes intellect, emotion, and affect, including intimate contact with the writer. Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised it, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.55 Byatt’s sentence instances what William James recognized as the innovative “third manner” that he located in the style of his brother James’s late fiction. William preferred in his own writing “to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made,” but he acknowledged to his brother that “the complication of inuendo [sic] and associative reference on the enormous scale to which you give way to it, does so build out the matter for the reader that the result is to solidify by the mere bulk of the process, the like perception from which he is to start. As air, by dint of its volume, will weigh like a corporeal body, so his own poor little initial perception, swathed in the gigantic envelopment of suggestive atmosphere, grows like a germ into something vastly bigger and more substantial.”56

Notes 1 For example, as the phrase appears in the title of Robert Caserio’s The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950 and The Novel in England, 1900–1950. 2 Raymond Williams argues that “‘Modernism’ as a title for a whole cultural movement and moment has… been retrospective as a general term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of ‘modern’ or even ‘absolute modern’ between, say, 1890 and 1940” (The Politics of Modernism, 32). Leading terms for culture and literary style since then have in their very titles indicated the continuing predominance of ‘modern’ and ‘modernist’ aspects: e.g., postmodernism and metamodernism. 3 Most prominent today in the politics of sexual and gender dissidence are struggles around the realities of gender nonconformity. In an earlier study focusing on Radclyffe Hall, the best-known English lesbian activist of the twentieth century, I argue that her fictions are experiments in articulating cross-gendered experience (Radclyffe Hall, 2011). 4 Foucault, History, I:101. Since sex between women had not been criminalized in England, debates about the legitimacy of Sapphic or ‘lesbian’

Introduction  17 ties in the early twentieth century tended to take the form of debates over censorship. See for instance, the two censorship trials that Hall found herself drawn into in the 1920s (Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall, Chapters 3 and 8; Medd, Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism and Medd, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature). See also Nancy Paxton’s forthcoming study of censorship scandals in literary modernism, including heterosexual censorship scandals. 5 Lawrence, The Bad Side of Books, 78. Subsequent references in the text to Lawrence are to this book. 6 Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 86–93. 7 On the present in Lawrence, see Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, 140. 8 de Certeau, The Writing of History, 2, 151. Subsequent page references to this work appear in the text. 9 “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations. For convenience sake, I use the title familiar from an earlier translation by Adrian Collins. 10 De Certeau defines history as a particular “practice (a discipline), its result (a discourse), or the relation of the two in the form of a ‘production’” (21). 11 Hext, Introduction, in Decadence in the Age of Modernism, 6. 12 Meyers, “The Savage Experiment,” 1. 13 On Schopenhauer, see Davis, Queer Beauty, Chapter 3. 14 See Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. 15 Stilling, Beginning at the End, 31–36. 16 Wood, Alfred Hitchcock, 12–15, 41–42. 17 Beginning with a chapter on Wilde as model and Charlie Chaplin as epitome, Jonathan Goldman has persuasively argued the central significance of celebrity culture for modernist film and literature. 18 Laurents, Original Story, 115, 30–131. 19 Wood, 42, 45. 20 Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Stephen. 21 Baldick, The Modern Movement, 365. 22 Among literary critics, the Victorian/postmodern relation has focused on the revival of Victorian form and content in anglophone novels since 1980. See, for example, Arias and Pulham. Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-­Victorian Fiction; Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism; and Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel.” 23 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations,” 264. On history and historicism in Benjamin, see Gilloch, Walter Benjamin, 224–233. On the harrowing circumstances in which the “Theses” were composed and rescued, see Steiner, Walter Benjamin, 165–173. On Benjamin’s final days, see Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 3–30. 24 Baldick, 170–180. More general than Baldick’s, my use of the term emphasizes serial chronology, especially in sectional and chapter titles. 25 Woolf, The Pargiters. 26 Benjamin, 261, 263. 27 For an accessible account of the term, see Badiou, Saint Paul. I use the word “evential” as an adjectival form referring to “event” in this sense (Romano, Event and World, 38). In contrast to Banfield’s account, which is conceptualized within the terms of analytic philosophy, Jesse Matz emphasizes the phenomenological character of Woolf’s thinking: “Woolf’s impressions rarely kept to the level of immediate apprehension…; rather, they partook of a phenomenological

18 Introduction awareness in which immediate visual apprehension was one with essential thought (Matz, “Pseudo-Impressionism,” 116) 28 Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 145. 29 Woolf, Beginning Again, 36–37; cf. Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, 99–100. On the political and economic side, David C. Smith in his biography of H. G. Wells reports that from the date of the new millennium forward, enlightened thinkers in England were confident that socialism, though not of the Marxist sort, would supplant capitalism in the new century (H. G. Wells, Chapter 4). 30 See the discussion in Chapter 4. 31 Humm, Modernist Women, 15. 32 David Trotter acknowledges the frequent comparison of structural elements of modernist writing in England to film technique, particularly to montage but warns against doing so too loosely (Cinema and Modernism, 1–3). 33 Humm, 130, 131, 137–138, 185–187. 34 Cited by Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 102—hereafter cited in text as Jay. 35 Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet” and Between Men, Chapter 9. 36 The best-known gender critique of Orwell’s work is Daphne Patai’s The ­Orwell Mystique. 37 Orwell’s portrayal of ‘Flip’ may be termed lesbophobic since his description of her at the opening of the essay resembles one that could be made of a masculine-style or “butch” woman. At the time, “Flip” is in conversation with “an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding-habit, or something that I took to be a riding-habit” who also frightens young Orwell (Orwell, Essays, 416). 38 See Betz, Lesbian Romance Novels. 39 The mutual devotion that accompanied Nellie Dowell and Muriel Lester’s work on behalf of Kingsley Hall in London’s East End provides a leading instance of female social desire in the opening years of the twentieth century (197-198). 40 Few Eggs and No Oranges. 41 Regarding female homosocial desire, see Sharon Marcus, Between Women. 42 Dyer, “The Secret Gardener: Alan Hollinghurst Unlocks Brit Lit.” http:// nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/alan-hollinghurst-2011-10/index1.html 43 Woolf, Moments of Being. 4 4 Cited by Jameson, Valences, 137. See Bewes, “Introduction: Temporalizing the Present,” 159. 45 See, for example, Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place and The Queer Art of Failure; Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Freeman, ed., Queer Temporalities, and author of Time Binds; Freccero, Queer, Early, Modern and “The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature”; Stockton, The Queer Child; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, and Matz, Modernist Time Ecology [Full bibliographical references for these titles are included in the bibliography of Chapter 10.] 46 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1, 11. 47 Dinshaw, 33, 5–7. 48 Luke, 3: 21–22 (The Holy Bible,76.) 49 Mitchell, 117. 50 For Benjamin, this is an extremely important point. (263). 51 Ibid., 120. 52 See Vicinus, Intimate Friends, and Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. 53 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. 54 Byatt, Possession, 510, 510–511. 55 Ibid., 512. 56 Cited by Jesse Matz in Modernist Time Ecology, 42, 43.

Introduction  19

Bibliography Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham. Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-­Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003. Balázs. Béla. Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Ed. Erica Carter and trans. Rodney Livingstone. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Baldick, Chris. The Modern Movement. Volume 10: 1910–1940. The Oxford English Literary History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. Bandyopadhyay, Alapan, and Anup Matilal, jt. eds. The Philosopher’s Stone: Speeches and Writings of Sir Daniel Hamilton. Calcutta: Sir Daniel Hamilton Estate Trust, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1976. Betz, Phyllis. Lesbian Romance Novels: A History and Critical Analysis. ­Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009. Bewes, Timothy. “Introduction: Temporalizing the Present.” Novel, 45.2 (­Summer 2012): 160–164. Boehmer, Elleke. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005. Caserio, Robert L. The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019. ———. The Novel in England, 1900–1950: History and Theory. New York: Twayne, 1999. Davis, Whitney. Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010. Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990. Desai, Mahadev. “Daniel Hamilton: Pioneer of Co-operative Movement in I­ ndia.” https://www.facebook.com/notes/nachiketa-desai/daniel-­hamilton-pioneer-ofco-operative-movement-in-india/406731679441292/ Dixon, Joy. Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Ghandi. Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005. Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. New York: Free Press, 2006. Goldman, Jonathan. Modernism and the Literature of Celebrity. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2011. Gutleben, Christian. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Hext, Kate, and Alex Murray, jt. ed. Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1919. Hodgson, Vere. Few Eggs and No Oranges: A Diary [1940–1945]. Pref. Jenny Hartley. London: Persephone Books, 2008.

20 Introduction Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009. Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1973. Laurents, Arthur. Original Story, By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. New York: Applause, 2000. Lawrence, D. H. The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays. Ed. Geoff Dyer. New York: New York Review Books, 2019. Lionnet, Francois. “Shipwrecks, Slavery, and the Challenge of Global Comparison: From Fiction to Archive in the Colonial Indian Ocean.” Comparative Literature, 64.4 (2012): 446–461. ———. “World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Coolie Odysseys: The Case of G. M. G. Le Clézio’s and Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean Novels.” Unpublished Essay. Livesey, Ruth. Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. Matz, Jesse. “Pseudo-Impressionism?” In The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012. Pp. 114–132. Maugham, W. Somerset. The Painted Veil. New York: Vintage, 2004. Meyers, Jeffrey. “The Savage Experiment: Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.” https://kenyonreview.org/journal/summer-2011/selections/the-savageexperiment-arthur rimbaud-and-paul-verlaine Orwell, George. Essays. Introduction Bernard Crick. London: Penguin, 2000. Patai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004. Reynolds, David. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 2014. Romano, Claude. Event and World. Trans. Shane Mackinlay. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2009. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic.” In Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983–1984. N.s., no. 10. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986. ———. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985. Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Shiller, Dana. “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel.” Studies in the Novel, 29.4 (Winter 1997): 538–560. Smith, David C. H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1986.

Introduction  21 Stilling, Robert. Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2018. Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. New York: Verso, 1989. Wood, Michael. Alfred Hitchcock, the Man Who Knew Too Much. New York: Amazon, 2015. Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964.

1

Modernity and Degeneration in Somerset Maugham and Paul Gauguin The Moon and Sixpence and the South Sea Tales

In his recent study, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, Vincent Sherry has directed attention to a temporal paradox in early modernist writing: namely, that despite its emphasis on contemporaneity, present time in works such as the seafaring fictions of Joseph Conrad is marked by an atmosphere of social, political, and cultural decline. Sherry locates this apparent contradiction in the subject-position of Conrad’s narrators, who carry with them their author’s “residual allegiance” both as a man who had once “served in the British mercantile empire” and as an observer noting “the intensifying pressure of the recognition of the end-of-empire days.”1 Sherry argues that Conrad’s fiction negates nineteenth-century narratives that equated the expansion of empire with the “Progress” (123) of civilization. Sherry instead finds in early twentieth-century works by British and Anglo-American modernists a sense of temporality as consisting in an abstract sense of “aftermath” (122), blank un-time, space in which time is suspended. 2 The sense of stasis that one frequently encounters in reading the Oriental fictions of Somerset Maugham expresses in temporal terms the folding of the narrative within a sense of imperial totality. Empire provides the inescapable framework in which the action occurs. This temporality includes three dimensions. In present time, empire is experienced as coming to an as yet deferred end. This moment is also recursive, referring to an earlier time, which some characters describe as one of imperial plenitude. Third, the present foreshadows the end of empire at some definitive but as yet unspecified moment in future such as, for example, the date of the formal partition of India in August, 1947. Imperial time, then, continually anticipates decline and ending, awareness of which can be discerned in the attitudes and behavior of fictional characters, for example, in a comment by Westfield, the District Superintendent of Police (19) in George Orwell’s Burmese Days, who remarks: “This country’ll never be fit to live in again. British Raj is finished if you ask me. Lost Dominion and all that. Time we cleared out of it….. No Anglo-Indian will ever deny that India is going to the dogs, or ever has denied it—for India, like Punch, never was what it was.”3

Maugham and Gauguin  23 In Maugham’s south sea tales and The Moon and Sixpence (1919), his homage to Paul Gauguin, Europeans often find themselves in a temporally suspended environment in which they are confined to remote, albeit oddly suburban, outstations with bungalows, well-tended gardens, tennis courts, golf courses, and social clubs. Further afield, at rubber plantations and in forests from which teak is extracted, time is experienced in terms of the rise and fall of the business cycle. The sense of time as repetitive or in abeyance responds to a usually unvoiced recognition that the British Empire, which reached its greatest physical extent in the decade following World War I, was time-dated, that is, that its contraction and likely end were glimpsed beyond the horizon of an already anticipated Second World War. Nonetheless, in an introductory note to The Casuarina Tree (1926), a collection of short stories set in British Malaya, Maugham engages the temporality of Empire in positive terms. There he briefly considers the timeline of Britain’s colonial dependencies by invoking the biological metaphor of the life span of the Casuarina tree. An ungainly plant often found growing at the edge of groves of mangrove trees in waste tidelands, the species plays a key role in supporting the formation of soils suitable for agriculture. Maugham compares this de facto fecundity to the fruits of labor of British officials, engineers, and plantation managers. He perceives these individuals to be as hardy and unprepossessing as “the Casuarina tree” itself, which “stood along the seashore, gaunt and rough-hewn, protecting the land from the fury of the winds.” Similarly, he continues, “planters and administrators… with all their shortcomings have… brought to the peoples among whom they dwell tranquility, justice and welfare.”4 Maugham distinguishes three generations among these temporary settlers: first, “the pioneers who had opened these lands to Western civilization.” Next, a second generation whose “work” had helped fashion a new “country…, peaceable, orderly, and sophisticated.” Those in this group were succeeded in turn by members of “a generation” whom Maugham traveled among, “more varied, but less adventurous” (v). This genealogy is not literal but symbolic since British entanglement in India, Malaya, and Borneo began far earlier than the model implies and was much more complex in its relation to indigenous relations of power than Maugham’s comments indicate. New factors included the arrival of white women, at times as prostitutes but more often as wives of local officials. Their appearance on the scene radically affected already existing mores governing intimacies between white men and native women.5 Despite the propagandistic character of the introductory note, Maugham’s stories dally with the pleasures, pains, and ennui of decadence, a time-space continuum rendered literal in the entanglement of British and, occasionally, American subjects in the territories of India, Malaya, China, and the South Seas. For example, the young narrator of

24  Maugham and Gauguin The Moon and Sixpence is divided between outward conformity to late Victorian bourgeois norms, on the one hand, and fascination with a rebellious alter ego, Charles Strickland, an émigré British artist who had abandoned his own wife and family at home in London. A successful middle-aged stockbroker and head of family, Strickland without notice deserts his family, at first for Paris, then for Marseilles, and, eventually, for Tahiti, where he lives as a bohemian art-maker and sensualist. On the pretext of agreeing to help Strickland’s wife find her husband, the narrator follows Strickland to France, then further abroad. For the remainder of the novel, the narrator seeks the solution of what he thinks of as the Strickland paradox: namely, how could this seemingly typical bourgeois morph overnight into a rebellious artist, abandoning family and business for the sake of personal and artistic freedom? Strickland’s revolt calls to mind that of another late Victorian rebel, namely the successful Anglo-Irish playwright, journalist, man about town, social critic, and sexual dissident, Oscar Wilde, who in 1895 had been tried and found guilty on charges of gross indecency with other males. Already earlier in his career, Wilde had been singled out for denunciation by the Austro-Hungarian Jewish physician, Max Nordau, in his book, Degeneration (1892; trans. 1895). In this work, Nordau, who positioned himself as the leading scientific expert on social and cultural degeneration, defined it as an ailment of the nervous system resulting from the conditions of contemporary urban existence. Citing Paul B ­ ourget, Nordau writes: A society in decadence ‘produces too great a number of individuals unfit for the labours of common life’; these individuals are precisely the degenerate; ‘they cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy,’ because they are ego-maniacs, and their stunted development has not attained to the height at which an individual reaches his moral and intellectual junction with the totality, and their ego-mania makes the degenerate necessarily anarchists, i. e., enemies of all institutions which they do not understand, and to which they cannot adapt themselves. It is very characteristic that M. Bourget, who sees all this, who recognizes that ‘decadent’ is synonymous with inaptitude for regular functions and subordination to social aims, and that the consequence of decadence is anarchy and the ruin of the community does not the less justify and admire the decadents, especially Baudelaire.6 Wilde and his associates, however, saw themselves and their work as constituting a self-consciously modern tendency within late Victorian culture with linkages to contemporary feminist, left liberal, democratic, Marxian, and anarchist modes.7 Maugham’s dispassionate exploration of the condition of working-class South Londoners in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), his admiration for avant-garde French art, and

Maugham and Gauguin  25 his bisexual personal life demonstrated an affinity with these strains in Victorian culture.8 In The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham’s affinity is even more pronounced with Gauguin, the French painter whose years in Tahiti and the Marquesas resulted in work that helped shape twentieth-century conceptions of the artist and art-making. Gauguin’s self-fashioning as a rebel against domestic obligations, his outspoken pursuit of sensual happiness, and the prominent place that his paintings enjoyed in the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1910) in London all contributed to making him a legendary figure. In addition, Gauguin shared Wilde and Maugham’s attraction to young men. In his Tahitian journal, Noa, Noa, Gauguin imagines having the experience of being in the position of the receiver in sexual intercourse with an androgynous yet virile young man: “Etre une minute l’être faible qui aime et obéit.”9 While serving in an ambulance corps in France in 1914, Maugham’s own sexual identity became more defined following his meeting with a young American homosexual, Gerald Haxton. At this time, the pair began an intimacy that was to continue until Haxton’s death in 1944. Pressured into marriage in England in 1915 after having unintentionally become a father, Maugham decided to leave London behind on his first journey to Polynesia, a trip in which Haxton accompanied him. Gauguin is a dialectical thinker who consistently undermines antithetical formulations, a procedure that results in the revaluation of key terms. When he arrived in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, he found not a South Sea idyll such as Herman Melville had described in Typee (1846) but instead a Maori population in course of being deracinated as a result of Tahiti’s colonial status. This condition was about to be formalized as a result of the imminent death of King Pomare, which occurred shortly after Gauguin’s arrival. To his surprise, Gauguin encountered an indigenous population in his view mimicking the signs of Western civilization. “It was Europe—the Europe which I had thought to shake off—and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, vices, and absurdities.”10 While still in Papeete, however, Gauguin discerned a way out of colonial degeneration. He sensed this possibility in the decoration that Queen Maraü prepared for the royal hall in which her deceased husband was laid out. “There I saw the queen, Maraü…. With the beautiful instinct of her race she dispersed grace everywhere about her, and made everything she touched a work of art” (2). I had disembarked too recently yet to distinguish how much of nationality, fundamental realness, and primitive beauty still remained in this conquered race beneath the artificial and meretricious veneer of our importations. I was still in a manner blind. I saw in

26  Maugham and Gauguin this queen, already somewhat mature in years, only a commonplace stout woman with traces of noble beauty. When I saw her again later, I revised my first judgment. I fell under the spell of her “Maori charm.” Notwithstanding all the intermixture, the Tahitian type was still very pure in her. And then the memory of her ancestor, the great chief Tati, gave her as well as her brother and all her family an appearance of truly imposing grandeur. She had the majestic sculptural form of her race, ample and at the same time gracious. The arms were like the two columns of a temple, simple, straight: and the whole bodily form with the long horizontal line of the shoulder, and the vast height terminating above in a point, inevitably made me think of the Triangle of the Trinity. (3) Gauguin ascertained signs of persistence and renewal despite the contemporary decline of the Maoris. He was to experience this reality personally in the domestic intimacy and sexual fulfillment that he established with a young adolescent, Tehamana, and again during his second visit with Pahura, another adolescent.11 Faced with the demands of single white male visitors, Tahitians had developed new forms of domesticity in the form of time-dated marriage contracts which permitted cohabitation between single young females and Europeans, an arrangement contracted under the watchful eyes of senior female members of a girl’s family (Noa, Noa, 27–30). This social instrument enabled Tahitians to manage the potentially disruptive sexual demands of foreigners in exchange for material benefits and enhanced prestige on the part of members of the family. At the same time, the limited duration of the contract served to conserve existing family and tribal structures necessary to the survival of Tahitians as a people. Following the end of their relationships with Gauguin, both Tehamana and Pahura retained eligibility as suitable partners for marriage among their fellow Maoris. Gauguin’s interest in Tahitian culture was not limited to his journals, art-making, and personal experimentation. His appreciation of Maori woodcarving is evident in the work that he made after being introduced to Maori sculpture and decorative arts.12 He also took an anthropological interest in Maori epistemology, cosmology, astronomy, and social structure. In a long discussion at the end of Noa, Noa, he explores the logic of Maori thought and observation. And he defends, in Darwinian terms, practices that appeared to other Westerners to mark the Maoris as savages in the customary sense of the term. For example, he defends the Maori practice of infanticide by arguing that it had provided a necessary means of warding off the exhaustion of natural resources, water, and food in their island economies. In the anthropological aspects of his engagement with Maori culture, Gauguin sought to establish it as worthy of serious consideration within the terms of contemporary European science.

Maugham and Gauguin  27 Gauguin revalues the meaning of the word savage and what he refers to as “my barbarianism,” a word that Keith Thomas argues was frequently used by Europeans in contrast to their own “civilization.”13 Invoking this term often served to provide a pretext for Western depredations upon colonial territories and their inhabitants. In Noa Noa, Gauguin also uses these words to refer to the Maoris of Tahiti. But in contrast to the usual meaning of the word when applied to the indigenous population, during his stay Gauguin came to apply the term to himself. Of the conversion experience that he underwent on his journey with the young man, Gauguin writes: “I was, indeed, a new man; from now on I was a true savage, a real Maori” (22). Not only he but also his son Emil embraced affiliation with indigenous alterity when, in the Preface to his father’s Intimate Journals, Emil wrote: “Finding civilization too irksome to be borne, he retired to Tahiti, where he lived and loved and painted and died like a savage.”14 One discerns this culture in the description of Queen Maraü cited above with her “charm” and her body, which Gauguin implicitly compares with the statuary and columns of ancient Egypt and Persia.15 These ‘savage’ civilizations occurred chronologically between earlier stages in human culture and the decadence of Classical and post-Classical civilization.16 Gauguin’s most pithy expression of this ethic and aesthetic occur in his dedication of the Intimate Journals to the art critic André Fontaisnas: “Moved by an unconscious sentiment born of solitude and savagery— idle tales of a naughty child who sometimes reflects and who is always a lover of the beautiful—the beautiful that is personal—the only beauty that is human” (vii). Even before Strickland leaves London, the narrator of The Moon and Sixpence finds himself troubled “by a vague uneasiness” following a pleasant outing with Mrs. Strickland and her children. He continues: Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values. I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change— change and the excitement of the unforeseen.17 The narrator resorts to periphrasis and repetition to avoid specifying what these dangerous desires might be. But he also defends his preoccupation with Strickland in words that echo both Wilde and Gauguin: To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults…. The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration,

28  Maugham and Gauguin sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story…. The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his life and character. (4–5) In “Rain,” the best known tale in The Trembling of a Leaf, the association of island culture with both cultural belatedness and life prior to the arrival of Europeans and Americans provides an opportunity to explore decadence as an oscillating figure of temporality which beckons simultaneously toward both a liberated experience of embodied existence and a feverish descent into abuse and self-negation. For Western visitors, something about the material environment is not right. To be ‘touched’ by it is to be contaminated.18 At the end of the first day at Pago Pago, Dr. Macphail, the level-headed Scot who, like the narrator of The Moon and Sixpence, serves as an implicated observer, is already unsettled by the onset of a monsoonal deluge. The rain “was beginning to get on his nerves.” Contrasting it to “our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth,” he reports that he finds the downpour to be “unmerciful and somehow terrible: you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature….” The rain “rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless” (136). The Samoans’ openly expressed sexuality disturbs their visitors. Accruing to herself the functions of local anthropologist as well as moralist, Mrs. Davidson, an American missionary, insists to Macphail on “the depravity of the natives” (121). Hence the need for someone like the Davidsons to convince the Samoans of their sinfulness. Her husband Rev. Davidson is shocked to inform Macphail that, on first contact, the islanders “had no sense of sin at all…. They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instill into the natives the sense of sin” (127).19 Natives danced, and dancing was sinful. They dressed in scanty attire, and that was sinful. In response, the Reverend imposed fines and work orders in order to force the natives to comply with his sense of propriety. But it is with a hint of loss that he says: “We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions. We had to make it a sin, not only to commit adultery and to lie and thieve, but to expose their bodies, and to dance and not to come to church. I made it a sin for a girl to show her bosom and a sin for a man not to wear

Maugham and Gauguin  29 trousers” (128). Mrs. Davidson for her part taught the women that a girl must not have sex before marriage. With the force of the American navy behind them (Pago Pago is in American Samoa), the Davidsons have been able to enforce their regime in the islands where they minister. But what happens when the source of infection is neither natives nor missionaries but a “flaunting hussy” (145) on the lam, namely Miss Sadie Thompson, a white American prostitute who practiced her trade in Iwelei, Honolulu’s red-light district, before moral vigilantes there forced the police to shut it down (132–133)?20 Like the missionaries, Thompson, now on her way back to a prison term in San Francisco, is in quarantine in Pago Pago. Her introduction to the narrative scrambles the binary oppositions on which the Davidsons’ claims to moral superiority are based: Westerner vs. Oriental, American vs. Samoan, White vs. Black, Christian vs. Pagan, civilized vs. depraved, modern vs. native. The rhetorical antitheses cannot tolerate Sadie’s incursion. 21 However, her presence, contaminated and contaminating, makes possible a wider analysis of decadence and degeneration. 22 In his essays on the survival of the cults of Apollo and Dionysus in medieval Europe, Walter Pater had already offered a reading in terms of social anthropology of how androgynous male beauty could function as both an emblem of and stimulus to male-male sexual desire and moral panic within an insular, monk-ridden community. 23 “Rain” offers itself to an analysis of the abuse of personal and institutional power when physical attractiveness, in this instance female, exists in an individual with no fixed position within existing hierarchies. At the start of the story, sexual errancy is associated with a dark skin, racial difference, and colonial subjection. Scandalously, Thompson is white not black; but her sexual charisma links her with racial degeneracy. Maugham provides a semiotic linkage to the cross of racial with sexual degeneracy in the ragtime music that plays on Thompson’s gramophone when she entertains American sailors in her room. At the time, ragtime was a popular form of black American music and dance. To the Davidsons, this acoustic contagion is proof enough, if proof there need be, of their fellow guest’s sexual irregularity, criminal behavior, and perversion of the reproductive instinct. Their evident satisfaction in suppressing her partying carries with it a strong suggestion of sadistic jouissance. The Davidsons capture Thompson in a sadomasochistic bind that mirrors the relation between the U.S. navy and Samoan subjects at Pago Pago. Her prior experiences in Honolulu and presumably in San Francisco as well, where she had been arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to prison on unspecified charges, suggest a similar set of power relations while underscoring a view of the pattern of prurient puritanism as being typically American. In the second half of the story, Davidson succeeds in isolating, brutalizing, and terrifying Thompson, then takes advantage of the advantage he secures in order to attempt to convert her to his warped Calvinist creed

30  Maugham and Gauguin and to demand that she willingly accept punishment for her sins. In the process, Davidson escapes the surveillance of his wife as he passes nights alone with Thompson in prayer and bible reading. Exactly what happens or is attempted during these vigils in her room is not disclosed, but something occurs on their last evening together that enrages Thompson while driving the minister, overcome with self-disgust, to take his life. Jeffrey Meyers reads this incident as one in which a “spirited whore,” takes the opportunity of being alone with Davidson in order to “use her sexual power to destroy him” (147). Thompson’s final words, however, suggest a different reading: “You men! You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs” (154). Thompson is furious to have had forced upon her attention Davidson’s uncontrolled desire, in other words, the evidence of his own regression from a supposedly civilized to a primitive condition. 24 Further, her words suggest that Davidson’s assault may have repeated similar attempts upon her earlier in life. Thompson’s crude and brazen public manner, her repeated complaints of being taken advantage of by men, suggest a scarcely suppressed rage at having been subjected to indignities of this sort in the past. As short story, stage play, and in multiple cinematic adaptations starring actresses such as Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth, Sadie Thompson’s tale of female self-assertion in face of monkish perversity became a classic twentieth-century topos. As such, it affirms both the values of liberal tolerance and of sexual individualism. Nonetheless, “Rain” is not an affirmation of sexual freedom. Rather, the story offers a case study, at once anthropological and psychological, of the institutions, both psychical and social, in which human beings find themselves entrapped at a particular time and place. Maugham suggests the limits of a liberal response to Thompson’s situation in his characterization of Macphail. Macphail attempts to defend Thompson against Davidson’s bullying, but his efforts are ineffectual. The wheels of hypocritical order grind on. Following Davidson’s death, it may be that Thompson will escape return to San Francisco; but her rage remains unassuaged. As in the case of the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall’s publisher in 1928 after she had defended desire between women in The Well of Loneliness, enlightened opinion could not save sexual dissidents from the enforcement of unjust laws. 25 Maugham had direct experience of this truth as a result of Haxton’s arrest in London in November, 1915, while Maugham was out of the country. Haxton was charged with six counts of gross indecency with another man based on the testimony of a hotel detective. Possibly the victim of entrapment by police, Haxton won acquittal of the charges on December 10. The victory, however, was Pyrrhic since the Judge, unconvinced of the young man’s innocence, arranged to have him declared an undesirable alien and permanently expelled him from England. Despite all efforts, Maugham was unable to have this ban lifted during Haxton’s lifetime. In addition, since Haxton was known to be Maugham’s lover, this blow struck threateningly close to Maugham’s

Maugham and Gauguin  31 public reputation and popular success.26 In practical terms, Haxton’s exclusion resulted in Maugham’s eventual decision to move his permanent home to the south of France. Future visits to Singapore and the Malayan archipelago in 1921 and 1925 provided material for stories included in The Casuarina Tree and Ah King (1933). In her biography of Maugham, Selina Hastings describes both books as having been “written during the years when he was roaming the world with Gerald Haxton and at his most fecund and creative.”27 The implication that Maugham’s relationship with Haxton fed his work runs counter to the action of “Neil MacAdam,” in Ah King, which includes an account of a male mentor-protégé relationship strongly marked by an avoidance of sex. At the beginning of the story, Angus Munro, Curator of the museum of natural science in the regional capital of Kuala Solor in Borneo, eagerly awaits the arrival of his new research assistant, Neil MacAdam, a young B.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh. Voyaging upriver to meet his new employer, Neil finds a new sense of “space and freedom. The country offered him a gracious welcome.” 28 Once arrived, he finds further satisfaction in his field work with Munro. For Munro, research in the jungles of Borneo is “the perfect life, a life of hardship, difficulty, often of privation and sometimes of danger, but rewarded by the thrill of finding a rare, or even a new species, by the beauty of the scenery and the intimate observation of nature, and above all by the sense of freedom from every tie” (266). The tie that develops between the two men echoes what Holden has found to be a familiar literary pattern in which two men are intimately linked by their shared pleasure in a “feminized” South Seas “landscape” (32). In contrast, however, Munro’s wife, Darya, finds the jungle to be a place of terror and confinement. Darya, Maugham writes, “had an unreasoning fear of the jungle. She was terrified of wild beasts, snakes and venomous insects. Though Munro had told her over and over again that no animal hurt you unless you molested or frightened it, she could not get over her instinctive horror” (267). Munro specializes in the study of “stick-insects” (266), creatures at a primitive stage of evolution, prior to sexual differentiation. Stick-insects reproduce by a process of what is termed parthenogenesis, a word that combines the Greek words for female virgin (parthenos) and creation (genesis). In parthenogenesis, fertilization of the ovum occurs in the absence of sperm or a seed. In other words, the character of Munro’s research contradicts conventional assumptions about the foundational character of sexual (i.e., gender) difference. In the context of “Neil MacAdam,” this natural phenomenon carries with it a further suggestion of sexual self-sufficiency. Virginity, moreover, has been thematized already at the beginning of the story, when, on the night of Neil’s arrival, he refuses the strenuous efforts of Captain Bredon, his host, to introduce him to the local brothels. In response, Neil says that he prefers to defer sex until after marriage.

32  Maugham and Gauguin The narrator’s Classicizing description of Neil’s physique also suggests an idealized sense of self-sufficiency. Assuming a degree of intimacy with both the (implicitly male) reader and the observant eye of the Captain, Maugham writes: He was a good-looking fellow, no one could deny that. Neil was standing with his hands on the rail, bare-headed, looking at the passing bank. He was tall, six foot two, with long, loose limbs, broad shoulders and narrow hips; there was something charmingly coltish about him…. He had brown curly hair with a peculiar shine in it; sometimes when the light caught it, it glittered like gold. His eyes, large and very blue, shone with good humour. They reflected his happy disposition…. But his most striking feature was his skin; it was very white and smooth, with a lovely patch of red on either cheek. It would have been a beautiful skin even for a woman. (251) Western descriptions of young males in the South Sea Islands often associated them with androgynous representations of Apollo in ancient Greek sculpture. Neil’s white skin is a reminder as well of his Celtic heritage. In the terms of Victorian racial theory, the Celts were thought to be biologically and archeologically linked with the ancient Greeks. 29 In the event, Munro and Neil’s chaste idyll is spoiled by Darya, a displaced Russian aristocrat who holds in contempt the other whites among whom she finds herself, especially females: “The women are intolerable. They are jealous and spiteful and lazy. They can talk of nothing. If you introduce an intellectual subject they look down their noses as though you were indecent. What can they talk about? They’re interested in nothing. If you speak of the body they think you improper, and if you speak of the soul they think you priggish” (256–257).30 Darya (Dare-ya?) is one of a number of sexually frustrated wives or lovers represented in Maugham’s fictions who are disaffected from men who have married or otherwise taken responsibility for them primarily out of a sense of noblesse oblige. Typically, these women turn to extra-marital sex, at times with brutal men or for pay, in order to express their rage and resentment against their partners. In The Moon and Sixpence, for example, Dirk Stroeve’s wife, Blanche, runs away with Strickland despite the fact that Stroeve had rescued her from poverty and degradation after she had been abandoned by a prior lover. Later, having been abused in turn by Strickland, Blanche takes her own life. An even more familiar example is Mildred in Of Human Bondage (1915), the working-class prostitute and mother out of wedlock who torments the novel’s protagonist, Philip Carey. And then there is Kitty Garstin, the young woman in need of a husband in The Painted Veil (1925), who cheats on the one whom she does find. Darya shames her husband by virtually flaunting her infidelities with the young single Brits who pass

Maugham and Gauguin  33 through the colony. Munro absorbs this punishing behavior with remarkable forbearance just as he shows patience with a “little captive gibbon” (266) that eats the larvae that he needs for his research: “Munro took the gibbon in his arms and, smiling, stroked it. ‘Diamond, Diamond,’ he said, … ‘you little know the damage you have done’” (266). The primary action of the story depends upon Maugham’s modern appropriation of two Classical Greek legends: the story of chaste Hippolytus, son of Theseus, and his second wife, Phaedra; and the story of Diana and Actaeon. In the first, Phaedra, overcome by lust for her stepson, Hippolytus, betrays him to her husband Theseus’ vengeance by alleging that the young man has attempted to rape her. In the second half, Munro and Neil undertake a trip together, far up the river into virgin territory, in search of new and rare specimens. Contrary to her usual practice, Darya decides to accompany them, in order, as Neil shortly learns, to continue her efforts to seduce him. When Neil (except in the “subconscious” dreams he confesses to her31) continues to resist, like the impassioned Phaedra, Darya threatens to accuse him to her husband. In his use of “Diana and Actaeon,” Maugham reverses the roles of the principals. Instead of young Actaeon being condemned to be pursued to the death by his hunting dogs after he accidentally witnesses Diana bathing at a spring, in Maugham it is Darya who violates Neil’s privacy by spying on him while he bathes in the nude in a pristine forest pool. “It was a lovely spot. It reminded Neil of the pools in Scotch streams he had bathed in as a boy, and yet it was strangely different. It had an air of romance, a feeling of virgin nature that filled him with sensations that he found hard to analyse” (277). Disrupting his bliss, Darya suddenly discloses her presence, strips, jumps into the pool, and begins splashing Neil. Although Neil manages to prevent the situation from getting out of control, matters continue to deteriorate. And later in the expedition, when Munro absents himself from the encampment for a full day in search of a better site, Darya, overcome by “wild desire” (298), sexually assaults the young man, then bites his hand, drawing blood, as he struggles to free himself. Angered and bewildered, Neil runs off into the jungle. Beside herself, Darya follows but is eventually outdistanced. Neil later regains self-possession and returns to camp. But Darya, as he recognizes, will be unable to make her way back without assistance. When Munro and his men, returning “just after dusk” (303) and finding her missing, attempt to locate her, Neil deliberately misdirects the rescue attempt. After a nightlong effort during a tumultuous storm, the men abandon the search. Munro is heartbroken, but Neil has hardened himself to Darya’s fate. While “Neil MacAdam” is rife with unconscious material, Maugham avoids the convention, common in English fiction of the 1920s, of structuring characterization in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, especially the Oedipus complex. The nearest that he comes to doing so is in the emphasis in his fiction, particularly in heterosexual

34  Maugham and Gauguin contexts, on sadomasochistic entanglements, both intersubjective and intrasubjective.32 Like Melanie Klein, who was to become the leading twentieth- century psychoanalyst in England, Maugham sees human intimacy in terms of domination and submission, including abjection.33 But Maugham, born in 1874, tends to remain within the terms of the sexual perversions as invented and elaborated in the writings of late nineteenth-century sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis.34 He also draws on the work of turn-of-the-century theorists of telepathy and paranormal psychology such as Frederic Myers. 35 In “Neil MacAdam,” Maugham emphasizes social, cultural, and economic factors that shape the characters’ psychology. Rather than seeking to determine an unconscious basis for Neil’s sexual panic, Maugham relies on the same motivation that he attributes to Rev. Davidson in “Rain,” namely Calvinist indoctrination. In Maugham’s eyes, the reduction of eros to the mechanics of licensed biological reproduction is pathological in its effects. Rendering sexual pleasure as an end in itself to be perverse, MacAdam’s Scottish Protestant upbringing has filled him with fear of bodily contagion, especially in sex with women. When Neil confesses to Darya that he is a virgin, “he could not bring himself to tell her how disgusting the idea of… [casual sex] was to him, and how vile he had thought the haphazard amours of his fellow students at Edinburgh. He took a mystical joy in his purity. Love was sacred. The sexual act horrified him. Its excuse was the procreation of children and its sanctification marriage” (298). Young male virginity is a strong theoretical motive in late nineteenthcentury aesthetic theory. The reference to Neil’s “mystical joy in his purity” refers, whether he is explicitly aware of the fact or not, to the discussion of “a moral sexlessness” that Pater argues Winckelmann had found in Greek sculptures of male and female androgynes. In Pater and Winckelmann, the term signals the presence of what Kathy Psomiades terms an “idealized same-sex desire” that could be and was sexualized in both Sapphic and male homoerotic contexts in British Aestheticist writing and the visual arts.36 The narrator is well aware of this tradition. Hence both the emphasis placed on Neil’s self-sufficiency and the narrator’s focus on the physical integrity, whiteness, and Greek perfection of his body, which for Maugham signals its implicit touchability—a tactile quality that Darya, for one, finds bewitching. Via whiteness and Greek culture, (self-)pleasure in purity also functions as a marker of racial integrity but with the codicil noted above that touch is in fact possible and can trigger equally contrary effects of sexually dissident jouissance or sexual panic. This marking is especially important in the context of Britain’s South-East Asian colonies in view of the importance that both colonizers and colonized placed upon the whiteness of British bodies as an index of fitness to rule. 37 Moreover, white purity refers back to the home country insofar as British notions of cultural superiority depended upon the idealization of middle- and

Maugham and Gauguin  35 upper-class male friendship, especially in sports (Neil is an outstanding sportsman) as well as in the characteristics of coolness and objectivity required in Neil’s scientific teamwork. Neil’s stance of Noli me tangere carries a strong psycho-sexual charge. He is in thrall to a taboo against getting “dirty”—i.e., dirtied as a result of racial, sexed, and/or gender difference. The subject of Diana and Actaeon in Renaissance and Baroque painting provides an opportunity for artists and viewers to indulge male-male sexual voyeurism. Within the picture plane, moreover, there is opportunity to represent female voyeurism between Diana and her attendant nymphs. In both cases the voyeurism is highly fetishistic since Diana’s nudity signifies her physical virginity. Neil’s scene of self-display at the pool is likewise fetishistic, a spectacle of chaste self-pleasure in gleaming singleness. The fluidity, warmth, and enveloping character of the liquid medium, however, insinuate a potential for abjection that haunts this virginal spectacle. As for Darya, who embodies all three of the threats mentioned above, Neil’s self-exposure is all too seductive. In characterizing Darya, Maugham draws on stereotypes of hypersexuality in Russian women. Neil does so as well when he attempts to make sense of her behavior: “He remembered the hysterical frenzy of Nastasya Filipovna in The Idiot, and felt that… [Darya] too could behave with that unfortunate lack of balance” (292). The characterization is Orientalist, grounded in a racial typology of Russians that defines them as East Asian: that is, as “Tartars”—even as “Chinks,” to cite the word that Radclyffe Hall uses in addressing her White Russian lover, Evguenia Souline, in love letters written in the 1930s: Soulina, you are not a beautiful woman, I suppose I was right when I thought you were ugly—but while I thought this I fell madly in love, and now I can see no face but yours, no face seems beautiful to me but yours—your queer little ugley, alian [sic] Chink Face. And no voice seems beautiful to me but yours—your queer, alian voice speaking broken English; and I ache to hear you speak my name which sounds different somehow when you speak it—when you say: ‘John.’38 Earlier, in Miss Brown, Vernon Lee’s “anti-aestheticist” Sapphic novel of 1884, Lee portrays Anne Brown, the protagonist, as sexually threatened (but also thrilled) by the advances of her fiancé’s Russian mistress, Sacha Elaguine.39 In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf reprises the typology in Sasha, “the androgynous and sensual Russian princess” with whom the sex-changing eponymous protagonist falls madly in love.40 Rather than regarding Darya as a woman out of order as Neil and other members of the English colony do, however, Maugham may think of her as a culturally marooned, desperately lonely individual in search of intimacy. Darya’s language recalls that of Sadie Thompson when, late in the story, Darya tells Neil how men had attempted to take advantage

36  Maugham and Gauguin of her vulnerability when she was an impoverished, stateless refugee at Yokohama: …. She made Neil’s blood boil, and at the same time embarrassed him very much, when she spoke of the men who tried to take advantage of her defencelessness and her poverty. She spared him no details. “Brutes,” he said. “Oh, all men are like that,” she replied. (260–261) As the title suggests, the short story, “The Yellow Streak” (1925), republished in The Casuarina Tree, is specifically concerned with racial contamination that occurs as a result of having sexual relations with young Malay women.41 Izzart, the protagonist of the story, is a quartercaste Eurasian. In Tendencies, Eve Kosokfsky Sedgwick defines queer as a signifier existing athwart sexual and gender difference.42 In “The Yellow Streak,” the term further specifies the crossing of signs of racial difference. Izzart reveals the effeminating effects of miscegenation by the cowardice that he shows in a moment of crisis. At the beginning of the story, Willis, the British Resident at Kuala Solor, assigns Izzart to serve as a guide to Campion, an engineer who has been contracted to conduct a survey of possible mining sites in the territory. When the boat in which they are returning to Kuala Solor overturns in a tidal surge or Bore, Izzart, fearing drowning, deserts Campion. The language of increasingly paranoid panic in which the story unfolds, however, makes it clear that “The Yellow Streak” has less to do with an action than with a condition—namely, Izzart’s long settled self-loathing, a combination of emotion and affect that conduces to a downward spiral of inebriation, social incompetence, and official irresponsibility. Despite the fact that Izzart’s father had been an engineer in the Government Service in the Malay States (202), Izzart is the only white man mentioned in the story who is not identified by occupation or title. The reader gradually comes to recognize that despite his education at Harrow Izzart’s position in Malaya is liminal, a fact arising from the contempt in which crossed-race individuals are held. “Every one knew,” Izzart says to himself, “that you couldn’t rely on Eurasians, sooner or later they would let you down; he knew it too, but now he asked himself whether they didn’t fail because failure was expected of them. They were never given a chance, poor devils” (204). Izzart himself continually imagines that his bodily appearance is giving him away. “He passed his hands reflectively along his bare and hairy legs. He shuddered a little. Though he had done everything he could to develop the calves, his legs were like broomsticks. He hated them. He was uneasily conscious of them all the time. They were like a native’s” (201–202).

Maugham and Gauguin  37 In entrusting Campion to “the care of Izzart because Izzart spoke both Malay and Dyak like a native” (196), Willis obliquely registers his awareness of the man’s bi-racial origin.43 Returning to Kuala Solor at the end of the journey, Izzart and Campion spend a long evening drinking at the home of a Resident named Hutchison. In the morning, Izzart is hung over. Campion tells him that his “colour” is “filthy.” Hutchison for his part notes that Izzart is “dark” (205). Later, after the mishap, when both men have been rescued and returned to Kuala Solor, Izzart compulsively gives himself away when he files his report to Willis. Willis, for his part, has already surmised that Izzart had abandoned Campion. As though not already sufficiently abjected, Izzart then repeats his confession of malfeasance to Campion himself, who informs him that his fault lies in his “yellow streak.” Campion continues: “Take a cheroot, dear boy,’” the generic name for Malay servants. Izzart is betrayed not only by bodily signs and loss of nerve but by gossip. Looking forward to meeting Hutchison for the first time, Izzart reflects that “of course he knew all about him just as Hutchinson knew all about him, and they would have many common friends to talk of” (197). Well, if Hutchinson knows “all about” Izzart, isn’t he already apprised of his mixed blood? And may not that be the reason why, after dinner when Campion has left, Hutchison feels comfortable enough to introduce his native partner and infant son to Izzart. Instead of recognizing that in doing so Hutchison is offering a gesture of fellow feeling, however, Izzart instinctively recoils. “His good humour was gone. It was the sight of Hutchinson looking fondly at the half-caste child which had upset him. ‘They’ve no right to have them,’ he said to himself. ‘They’ve got no chance in the world. Ever’” (201). Snubbing Hutchison, Izzart comments: “Of course it’s a matter of taste. If I have any kiddies I’m going to see that they have a white mother” (201). The animadversion is also directed at Izzart himself, whose mother the reader later learns is a half-caste. To encounter real fellow feeling one needs to consider the actions of a number of the non-white actors during the crucial incident of the tidal surge. Izzart’s “boy,” Hassan, twice saves his master’s life. First, by preventing him from letting go of the boat in order to attempt to swim to shore at the height of the Bore.44 Hassan saves Izzart again, later, by reaching a floating oar to him just as he is about to go under. Hassan then helps him swim to shore. Later, Izzart learns similarly that two of the Dyak prisoners who had been assigned to row the boat on the last leg of the return to Kuala Solor are responsible for having saved Campion’s life. Campion remarks: ‘I owe my life to these two sportsmen here.’45 He indicated with a cheery nod two of the Dyak prisoners…. ‘They were hanging on to that blasted boat on each side of me and somehow they cottoned on to it that I was down and out…. I don’t know how they managed it,

38  Maugham and Gauguin but somehow they got hold of the mattress we’d been lying on, and they made it into a roll. They’re sportsmen, they are. I don’t know why they didn’t just save themselves without bothering about me. They gave it me.’ (216)46 In contrast are the passing Malay boatmen who ignore them. At that moment two dug-outs with Malays in them riding the Bore, passed swiftly by them. They shouted for help, but the Malays averted their faces and went on. They saw the white men and did not want to be concerned in any trouble that might befall them. It was agonizing to see them go past, callous and indifferent in their safety. (211) Maugham uses these actions to provide an updated version of the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke: 10: 27–35). True humanity is found not in the whites but among the the Malays and Dyaks. This quiet but obvious observation plus Izzart’s repeated, unsuccessful attempts to master the semiotics of colonial sociality communicate a sense that the white colonials tend to lead a superficial, amoral existence. Their continual game-playing is further undercut by what Hastings refers to as an obsessive preoccupation with “prestige” (258). In colonies where they formed a miniscule minority lacking physical means to secure itself against determined popular resistance, British dominance relied on the magical efficacy of prestige, a sense that these outsiders were somehow special creatures, a sense based in part on their color. Orwell writes: “A sahib has got to act like a sahib…[;] it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives.’”47 Prestige depended on an ability to manipulate the signs of power, authority, and privilege; it also depended on the suppression of certain facts and suspicions among members of the dominant group themselves. Often the unstated subject of Maugham’s Malay short stories is the shaping effects of the culture of secrecy in which whites were compelled to live. For example, at the end of “Rain,” the inference that Sadie Thompson will not be transported back to San Francisco following the suicide of her persecutor is a likelihood that hangs silently in the air. The secret upon which decorum depends at the end of “Neil MacAdam” is the fact that, as a colonial might put it, “something” had “happened” between Neil and Darya when alone together that accounted for her disappearance. Similarly the shared cheroot at the end of “The Yellow Streak” speaks to the phallic burnt offering that Campion and Izzart share in face of the open secret that both men failed one another in a moment of crisis—and that each had required a ‘boy’ or Dyak to rescue him.

Maugham and Gauguin  39 Given the ubiquity of boys in the domestic service of government officials plus the “liberal sexual climate” that existed in the Federated Malay States, male sex was not difficult of access. Hastings contends that heterosexual relationships across lines of race were tolerated as long as they remained outside the public sphere but that reference to “interracial homosexuality” was “taboo” (263). Her view, however, is contradicted in “The Yellow Streak” in the gossip of two scurrilous characters, one native, one a British Cockney, who frequently smear others with allegations of male-male sexual impropriety, especially pedophiliac. The story, moreover, broaches the topic of unconscious male homosexual desire, which Noel Coward had publicized a year earlier in his hit play, The Vortex (1924).48 Coward’s play ends with a sensational scene, recalling Hamlet’s dramatic confrontation with his mother in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, which suggests that too great an intimacy between mother and son may have perverted the boy’s sexual character. Maugham echoes this sort of entanglement in a long non-diegetic passage that focuses on Izzart’s half-caste mother living in England. The narrator observes the “deep tenderness” and the “almost … physical bond between” the pair, “something stronger than the ordinary feeling of mother and son” (203). Maugham addresses his constraint in dealing with male-male affect and emotional engagement, not to mention male sex, in the metadiscourse of the Introduction to Ah King where he is shocked into recognizing his habitual practice of distancing himself from intimates, in this case, Ah King, the 20-year-old Chinese servant who accompanied him on his 1922 tour of Borneo, Indo-China, and Siam (1). Although the circumstances in which Maugham is introduced to the young man are dubious, even “sinister” (1), to use Maugham’s word, Ah King proves to be a highly reliable and loyal servant and companion. Despite Maugham’s high professional regard for Ah King’s services, however, he is shocked and nearly overwhelmed by Ah King’s grief when Maugham tells him that his services will no longer be necessary: “Then I saw that he was crying. I stared at him with amazement. An excellent servant, he had attended to my wants for six months, but he had always seemed to me strangely detached…. It had never occurred to me for an instant that he looked upon me as anything but an odd, rather silly person who paid his wages and gave him board and lodging. That he had any feeling for me had never entered my head” (3). As one might expect, Maugham’s immediate reaction is one of embarrassment. “I felt a little uncomfortable.” Then, however, he is granted a moment of insight: “I had never thought of him as a human being. He wept because he was leaving me. It is for these tears that I now give his name to the collection of stories that I invented while he was travelling with me” (3–4). The incident reflects the managed distance with which Maugham handled his ties with others, especially persons of color. But this distance

40  Maugham and Gauguin makes sense as well in terms of the dislocation of a primarily homosexual man living in a heterosexual culture regarding which homosexuality was absent, inverted or criminal. Distance also informs effects in his fiction, especially in the short stories with their frequently multiple narrators and their subtle unfolding, which may disclose who or what relation is the most significant subject of a story only in its final pages— just as in this Introduction we learn in the last lines that it pertains less to Ah King’s emotional investment than to Maugham’s own practice of disengagement. Disengagement, distance, and an eye askant of normal intimacy are features shared between modernism and the Decadence. Early in this chapter, I related the decadent character of Maugham’s Orientalist fiction to a pervading sense of temporal stasis in early modernist writing by Joseph Conrad among others. The modernist debt to literary decadence, however, is more often associated with questions of style.49 Stylistic decadence in Maugham exists not in a decorated, periphrastic, and recherché style such as one finds in Conrad, Wilde, or the late work of Henry James but rather in the rhetorical stance of detachment that Maugham observed to be in play in the writing of Baudelaire and Huysmans.50 Self-conscious emotional distance provides a defense, at once personal and social, from an intrusive but uncomprehending externality. Baudelaire and his heirs fashioned this reserve in the stance of the dandy, highly observant but disengaged and morally neutral. In his essay on the dandy, Baudelaire associates this social type with self-conscious resistance in the face of emergent modern mass society. Hence the dandy is associated with decline: Dandyism appears above all in an age of transition when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, politically and financially ill at ease, but are all rich in native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter as it will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow. Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence.51 Notwithstanding this characterization, Matei Calinescu in his study of decadence as one of the “five faces of modernity” emphasizes the “dialectical complexity” of the relationship between the seemingly contradictory notions of progress and decline. As Baudelaire’s insistence on decadence as an aspect of modernity indicates, the relation between the two is complex and productive. Calinescu attributes this situation to the fact that in Judeo-Christian thinking the idea of decline, even of Final Days, is closely associated with the idea of personal and collective transformation in the form of the advent of the New Jerusalem. This

Maugham and Gauguin  41 complication lends intense urgency to the concept of decadence while impelling it toward the notion of total renewal.52 Maugham’s association of British control of its colonies with the institution of “tranquility, justice and welfare” may owe something to this tendency.53 But in the temporal continuum of the stories in his three collections of tales from the South Seas the sense is much more of an end game.

Notes 1 Sherry, 126. 2 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 45. 3 Orwell, 29. 4 Maugham, The Casuarina Tree, v, vi. Subsequent page references to stories in this collection occur in the text and notes. 5 See Hyam’s study, Empire and Sexuality. 6 Nordau, Degeneration, 301–302. 7 Authoritarian tendencies, however, can also be found among Decadent writers such as Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo). See for example his medieval pastiche, Hubert’s Arthur. 8 During the 1890s, Maugham, who was 21 in 1895, was actively bisexual. Three close companions of these years were either bisexual or homosexual: Adney Walter Payne, Wentworth Huyshe, and Augustus Hare (Meyers, Somerset Maugham, 38–40.) 9 Gauguin writes of his desire for an “ami naturel, et nous étions seulement tous deux. J’eus comme un presentiment de crime, le desir d’inconnu, le reveil du mal. Puis la lassitude du role de mâle qui doit toujours être fort, protecteur; de lourdes épaules à supporter. Etre une minute l’être faible qui aime et obéit.” Cited by Holden, Orienting Masculinity, 31. See also Mathews, Paul Gauguin, 185. For more on homoerotic aspects of Gauguin’s art and personal experience in Tahiti and later the Marquesas, see Mathews, 183–186. Hal Foster offers a detailed reading of the sexual complexity, heterosexual, homophilic, and homophobic, of this long passage (Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 21–27). “The wish to be woman” is a desire frequently expressed in male ­homoerotic Decadent writing. See, for example, my discussion of Walter Pater’s fascination with the work of Leonardo da Vinci in Masculine Desire, 130–146. Noa, Noa was originally published in La Revue blanche in 1897. 10 Gauguin, Noa, Noa, 2. Subsequent page references to this work appear in the text. 11 Particularly the latter arrangement was highly transactional (Mathews, 213–214). There is also a suggestion in Noa, Noa of possible coercion by members of at least one of the partners’ families. Gauguin’s relations with Tehamana and Pahura continue to be subjects of scandal. See the article, “Is it time Gauguin Got Canceled?” www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/arts/design/ gauguin-national-gallery-london.html?searchResultPosition=2 12 Foster, “The Primitivist’s Dilemma” and Childs, “Gauguin and Sculpture.” For another important revisionist exhibition of Gauguin and his works, see Groom, ed., Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist. See Farago’s review, “Liberating Gauguin,” C13. On primitivism see Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art 13 On the binary opposition between barbarianism and civilization, see Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility. 14 Gauguin, Intimate Journals, vii. Subsequent page references to this work appear in the text.

42  Maugham and Gauguin 15 Goldwater argues that Gauguin’s writing is based on an antithesis between modern European civilization and the still remaining elements of Maori culture that he found in Polynesia. In his discussion of the latter, Gauguin supplements and corrects a general notion of primitivism with the idea of cultures of savages and barbarians—including non-Western civilizations such as those of the Persians and Egyptians. Psychologically, Gauguin identifies with the latter outlook as, for example, when he speaks of “my barbarianism” (67) in a letter to August Strindberg. See Goldwater, 66–68. 16 For the rich and contradictory discourse on primitivism that occurs in early modern political theory, see Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality.” 17 Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 14–15 (italics mine). The passage is one of a number in the novel that convey an impression of autobiographical pressure—on the part of both the narrator and the autobiographical signature of the text. 18 120. 19 Davidson’s Johannine intensity recalls the figure of John the Baptist in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. 20 Maugham includes his notes on his experience of Iwelei when he visited Honolulu in 1916 in A Writer’s Notebook, 101–103. 21 In Orienting Masculinity, Holden focuses on this structure. 22 Cf. Holden on Thompson, 56. 23 Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 102–116, 167–192; see also “The Androgynous Body.” For the ideological mobilization of Classical male and female androgynes and hermaphrodites in Enlightenment aesthetics and archaeology, see also Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, and Davis, Queer Beauty. 24 Holden, 33. 25 Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall, 186–213. 26 Information in this paragraph is from Meyers, Somerset Maugham, 102–103. 27 Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 258. 28 Maugham, Ah King, 250. Subsequent page references to “Neil MacAdam” in the text refer to this book. 29 See Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 10–15. Darya’s estimate contradicts the conventional view of British women as em30 issaries of Empire’s civilizing mission. 31 “One can’t help one’s dreams,” Neil says, “but they are an indication of what is going on in the subconscious” (288). 32 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 400–404. 33 Laplanche and Pontalis emphasize the importance of not conflating sadism with aggressiveness, an error which, in their view, Klein makes (401). 34 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1, Part 2: 66–129. 35 Myers, Human Personality. See also Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy. These tendencies are most prominent in Maugham’s 1908 novel, The Magician. 36 Quoted by Psomiades, “‘Still Burning from This Strangling Embrace,’” 25; see also p. 24. 37 Hastings, 258–259. 38 Hall, Your John, 82, 4. 39 Psomiades, 22. 40 See Denisoff, “Many Lips Will I Kiss,” 246. See his comments on Russian sexual dissidence as signifying “an orientalized Other” (244) against which Paterian Hellenism could be defined.

Maugham and Gauguin  43 41 For the interplay between racial and sexual shame, see Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame, Introduction, 5–23. Page references to “The Yellow Streak” in text and notes refer to The Casuarina Tree. 42 “Queer’ is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, e­ ddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across—it comes from the IndoEuropean root—twerkw, which also yields the German quer ­(transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart” (xii). 43 The Dyak or Dayak are members of a group of indigenous peoples of Borneo. 4 4 “A Bore is a tidal wave that, by reason of a peculiarity in the lie of the land, surges up certain rivers” (205). Maugham and Haxton were caught in one while traveling in Borneo in 1921. Haxton subsequently experienced a heart attack, as a result of which the pair spent three months at a sanatorium in Java where he recuperated (Meyers, 153). 45 Doubtless spoken in a tone of condescension. Campion is a racist. 46 Dayaks are inhabitants indigenous to Borneo. They are referred to in the short stories as black and were considered by Europeans to be the most primitive of the racial groups whom the Dutch and British encountered there. 47 Quoted by Hastings, 259. Maugham and Orwell also observe how ‘boys’ and native mistresses attempted to gain power over their masters by corrupting them. 48 Spencer, “The Vortex, Rose Theatre, Kingston.” See also Sheridan Morley, A Talent to Amuse, 77–80. 49 On decadent style, see Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Weir also pays due attention to questions of temporality in decadence such as those posed by Calinescu. 50 Maugham imitates Huysmans’ style and subject matter in The Magician, Ch. 8. 51 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 28. 52 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 155, 152–154. 53 The Casuarina Tree, Introduction, vi.

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1970. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Posmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1987. Childs, Elizabeth C. “Gauguin and Sculpture: The Art of the ‘Ultra-Sauvage.’” In Gauguin: Metamorphoses, ed. Starr Figura. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Pp. 36–47. Davis, Whitney. Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010. Dellamora, Richard. “The Androgynous Body in Pater’s ‘Winckelmann.’” Browning Institute Studies, 11 (1983): 51–68. ———.“Bataille/ Wilde: An Economic and Aesthetic Genealogy of the Gift.” Special issue: Gift, Theft, Apology. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical ­Humanities, 6 (August 2001): 91–99. ———. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990. ———. “Productive Decadence: ‘The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought’: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde.” New Literary History, 35 (Autumn, 2004): 1–18.

44  Maugham and Gauguin ———. Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ———. “Sexuality.” In The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Dino F. Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes. 4 volumes (print and electronic editions). Edinburgh: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Denisoff, Dennis. “Many Lips Will I Kiss: The Queer Foreplay of ‘The East’ in Russian Aestheticism.” In Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature, jt. ed. Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. 241–260. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Volume 1. 1898; republished New York: Random House, 1936. Farago, Jason. “Liberating Gauguin,” New York Times, August 10, 2017, C13. Foster, Hal. “Primitive Scenes.” Prosthetic Gods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. 1–52. ———. “The Primitivist’s Dilemma.” In Gauguin: Metamorphoses, ed. Starr Figura. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Pp. 49–60. Gauguin, Paul. Gauguin: A Retrospective, jt. ed. Marla Prather and Charles F. Stuckey. New York: Park Lane, 1989. ———. Gauguin: Metamorphoses, ed. Starr Figura. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. ———. Intimate Journals. Trans. Van Wyck Brooks. Pref. Emil Gauguin. 1921; rev. ed. Mineola: Dover, 1997. ———. Noa Noa. Trans. O. F. Theis. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1919. ———. Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal. Trans. O. F. Theis. 1919; rpt. New York: Dover, 1985. Gilmore, David D. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1990. Goldwater, Robert. Primitivism in Modern Art. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1967. Groom, Gloria, ed. Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017. Hall, Radclyffe. Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall. Ed. Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997. Hastings, Selina. The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012. Holden, Philip. Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham’s Exotic Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. ———. “Rethinking Colonial Discourse Analysis and Queer Studies.” In Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature, jt, ed. Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. 295–321. Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990. Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith and introd. Daniel Lagache. New York: Norton, 1973. Lovejoy, Arthur O. “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality.’” Modern Philology 21 (1923): 165–186. Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002.

Maugham and Gauguin  45 Mathews, Nancy Mowll. Paul Gauguin, an Erotic Life. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2001. Maugham, W. Somerset. Ah King. Garden City: Doubleday, 1933. ———. The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005. ———. The Magician. Introd. Robert Calder. New York: Penguin, 2007. ———. The Moon and Sixpence. [No place]: Jefferson Publications, 2015. ———. The Painted Veil. New York: Vintage, 2004. ———. The Trembling of a Leaf: Stories of the South Sea Islands. New York: George H. Doran Co., 2013. ———. A Writer’s Handbook. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Melville, Herman. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. New York: Penguin, 1996. Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004. Morgan, Ted. Maugham: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. Morley, Sheridan. A Talent to Amuse: A Biography of Noël Coward. London: Pavilion, 1986. Myers, Frederic W. H. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Introd. Gardner Murphy, volume 1. 1903. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Trans. from the second German edition. Introd. George L. Mosse. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993. Orwell, George. Burmese Days. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1962. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The 1893 Text, ed. with Textual and Explanatory Notes by Donald Hall. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980. Potts, Alex. Flesh and Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1994. Psomiades, Kathy. “‘Still Burning from this Strangling Embrace’”: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics.” In Richard Dellamora, Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 21–41. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993. Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Spencer, Charles. “The Vortex, Rose Theatre, Kingston.” The Telegraph, February 14, 2013. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre-reviews/9870883/TheVortex-Rose-Theatre-Kinston-review.html Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer.” Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2007. Sweetman, David. Paul Gauguin, A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Teilhet-Fisk, Jehanne. Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation of Gauguin’s Polynesian Symbolism. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983. Thomas, Keith. In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England. Waltham, MA: Brandeis Univ. Press, 2018. von Krafft-Ebing, Richard. Psychopathia Sexualis. Philadelphia, PA: F. A. Davis Co., 1892. Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 1986. ———. Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act. Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. Boston, MA: Bruce Humphries Publishers, n. d.

2

Haunting the West End Oscar Wilde and Silent Hitchcock

Drawing in part on suggestions made by Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, Vincent Sherry emphasizes the relationship between the sense of the present in the words modern, modernism, and modernity and a counter sense of “just now” (33), a moment in which the present is experienced as slipping into the past. Sherry refers to this sense of divided time as the “temporal imaginary” (33) of modernism.1 The “just past” of Alfred Hitchcock’s self-consciously modernist silent films, The Lodger (1926) and Downhill (1927), works differently. 2 Despite their references to contemporary media and technology, these films incorporate aspects of two fin-de-siècle sensations: the Ripper murders (1888) and the trials of Oscar Wilde (1895). In contrast, in Somerset Maugham’s South Seas tales, decadence functions less as a mode of temporality than as a shared social attitude and a determining economic socio-political context. In addition, as Sherry points out, pervasive references to the past in self-consciously modern works are often framed within the terms of a moral discourse that tends to rob allusions to past events of specific reference. Settings in the near past can also be used to license uninhibited sensation, an effect produced in both of Hitchcock’s films. The incidents invoked in The Lodger and Downhill, however, are close enough to the 1920s, in part as a result of the success of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ updating of the Jack the Ripper sensation in fictionalized form in her novel, The Lodger (1913), so as to result in the apparent anachronism of Victorian material represented within a self-consciously post-War cinematic frame. Hitchcock in his film deliberately conflates the two times, juxtaposing up-to-date visual imagery of the West End entertainment district with mist-shrouded Whitechapel murder scenes reminiscent of London in the late 1880s. The resulting phantasmagoric effect suggests continuities between Victorian and modern London. Not only Victorian events but also Victorian intellectual speculation continues to be embedded within self-conscious English modernity, inflecting middlebrow intellectual discourse and the contemporary media. This mixing suggests the suitability of making use of terms such as anachronisms, survivals, and symptoms in analyzing temporal reference in these films. This chapter draws on a psychoanalytic hermeneutic in

Wilde and Hitchcock   47 dealing with temporality in the films and related materials in the legacy of Oscar Wilde. Beginning with the well-known palmist Cheiro’s autobiographical anecdote about an encounter with Wilde and continuing with a discussion of “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” Wilde’s comic short story about palm-reading, the chapter continues with an analysis of how Wilde’s specter haunts the career of Ivor Novello, the early twentieth-century London actor, playwright, and lyricist, who collaborated with Hitchcock on both films. Whether one reads forward from Wilde to Novello or backward from Novello and Hitchcock to Wilde, the details under discussion often appear to be symptomatic in character. While a historicist scholar might object to drawing on psychoanalysis in interpreting this material, Sigmund Freud’s own work is invested in the concept of telepathy, an axiomatic belief shared between Victorian speculative psychology and his own theory of the transference as elicited in the psychoanalytic session. In an essay in Victorian Studies, Matthew Rowlinson has approached the problem of reading events as symptoms pointing backwards by drawing upon a set of reflections of Slavoj Žižek, who remarks: “The Lacanian answer to the question: From where does the repressed return? is therefore, paradoxically, From the future. Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depths of the past, but constructed retroactively.” Žižek continues: “the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier’s network. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way” (Žižek 55–56). Rowlinson builds on this reversal of customary thinking in making the point that all work with historical materials reconstructs the fragmentary remains of the past in the present. In other words, Victorian studies is always a dialectic involving at least two different moments and two different consciousnesses, one in the past, one in the present. Acknowledging this fact would in itself go far toward resolving the conceptual impasse between theoretical and historical understanding in the field of history. Even when historicist work brings Victorian theory to bear in analyzing Victorian materials, insofar as the work is carried on in the present, one is working with contemporary understandings of theory, even if that theory bears the signature of a nineteenth-century author such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, or J. G. Frazer. At the end of his essay, Rowlinson suggests that a theoretical understanding of the concept of anachronism might be used to resolve the

48  Wilde and Hitchcock antithetical positioning of theory and history: “The idea of the anachronism as the kernel of social existence would provide a basis from which to… [enable] the use of psychoanalysis in the study of Victorian Britain. Its central claim, that sexuality is organized around an archaic core that is anachronistic with respect to any historical present, suggests a limit to the explanatory power of critical practices that understand sex [and gender] through historically specific discourses, representations, or performances.”3 Of course, the idea that sexuality has “an archaic core” is itself late Victorian, hence the frequent use of the word primitive to refer to abnormalities of gender or sexuality by Darwin, Frazer, and others. Contemporary theory internalizes this Victorian theoretical moment within its own discourses. To recapitulate, two ways in which past and present are combined in historical analysis are: first, by the involvement of at least two different temporalities in any historical analysis; and, secondly, more specifically, insofar as the contemporary analysis of sex and gender includes axioms drawn from late-Victorian biology and psychology. One may, however, push both points further by raising the question as to the extent to which historical analysis is engaged in reconstructing historical subjectivities. To the extent that historical work necessarily involves such reconstruction, contemporary work in Victorian studies, willy-nilly, is engaged in a major enterprise shared with the late Victorians and early modernists, namely the effort to surmount the limits of ego-experience by entering into the subjectivities of others. Theosophy, for example, was premised on the belief that the same soul experiences different subjectivities in different times and places—and that these other selves may be reexperienced in the present. Spiritualism entailed the belief not only that human personality survives death but that it is possible for individuals to communicate with the deceased. In the 1910s and 1920s, Sigmund Freud felt it necessary to confront the challenge to the new science of psychoanalysis posed by models of speculative psychology developed in the final 20 years of the Victorian period, not only Theosophy and Spiritualism but, more especially, the extensive body of research assembled by the Society for Psychical Research. Accepting an invitation to write on the topic of extra-ego psychology in the Proceedings of the Society in 1912, Freud made two major points. First of all, he conserved the limits of the ego against the theory, popular within the Society, of multiple or split personalities. Freud writes: “I venture to urge against this theory that it is a gratuitous assumption, based on the abuse of the word ‘conscious.’ We have no right to extend the meaning of this word so far as to make it include a consciousness of which its owner himself is not aware.”4 Second, counter to notions of subliminal or subconscious mental activity also held within the Society, Freud insisted on the singularity of the concept of the unconscious. 5

Wilde and Hitchcock   49 On the topic of access to unconscious aspects of the psyche, however, psychoanalysis shared a key concept with the other movements that I have mentioned, namely, telepathy, the direct transference of affect or thought from one human being to another.6 As Roger Luckhurst observes, the entire range of phenomena studied by psychical researchers between 1882 and 1930 depended on belief in telepathic communication. In the early 1920s, Freud too came to accept this concept. However, he was troubled about the fact of his belief becoming known since he feared that the specific terminology and techniques of psychoanalysis such as transference and counter transference might be subsumed within the term. Accordingly, he first shared this belief at a private meeting “of… [his] closest followers” in the Harz Mountains in 1921.7 The paper remained unpublished until 1941 following Freud’s death. Eventually, Freud came to claim that psychoanalysis had priority over the concept of telepathy even though the latter term had already been invented in 1882 (Luckhurst 60). In “Dreams and Occultism” (1933), Freud asserts that psychoanalysis alone “has paved the way for the assumption of such processes as telepathy.”8 The sharing of this premise with other modes of speculative psychology is an important point to bear in mind. As Luckhurst points out, telepathy is a “black box” concept, one basic to the articulation of a particular system of thought but not demonstrable in its own right (70). Recognition of this ground of psychoanalysis requires a necessary resistance to the claims made by Freud and others about the scientific character of psychoanalytic interpretation. For example, if, as Freud says in “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” it “must” be conceded that “fortunetellers” or “mediums” (184) have telepathic powers, are they not at least in this respect on a par with analysts? Not in Freud’s view, since the analyst is able to supplement the medium’s knowledge with an awareness of the place of unconscious wishes in thought-transference. Like other systems of belief, including scientific ones, psychoanalysis is based on a priori assumptions. As such, its basis is rhetorical, even fictive. It is important for practitioners of psychoanalytic theory to bear in mind the imaginative ground of its architecture. Moreover, the sharing of a belief in telepathy with other thought-systems of the period locates Freudian theory within the ambit of late Victorian scientific, religious, and psychological thinking. In this respect, it is literally not anachronistic to think the Victorians, so to speak, in relation to psychoanalysis. And since key aspects of Theosophical and Spiritualist belief may be found in classic works of mid-century such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854, 1856), it is reasonable to bring Freud’s thought to bear in considering these works, their cultural and social contexts, and their authors. Telepathy hangs in the air. There is nothing to which it necessarily attaches. It is by no means synonymous with or reducible to the

50  Wilde and Hitchcock technologies, usually drawn from home entertainment and vaudeville but also from the medical examining room and from the talking-cure, whereby it became manifest. In Freud’s view, telepathy was significant not in itself but as a symptom, hence the need for analysis. In “Dreams and Telepathy,” a paper first published in German and in English in 1922, Freud argues that telepathy is useful insofar as the analysis of transferred thoughts brings to light important axioms of psychoanalysis, such as the theory of the Oedipus complex. At the end of the essay, he writes: The instances of telepathic messages or productions which have been discussed here are clearly connected with emotions belonging to the sphere of the Oedipus complex…. Telepathy has no relation to the essential [i.e., unconscious] nature of dreams; it cannot deepen in any way what we already understand of them through analysis. On the other hand, psycho-analysis may do something to advance the study of telepathy, in so far as, by the help of its interpretations, many of the puzzling characteristics of telepathic phenomena may be rendered more intelligible to us; or other, still doubtful, phenomena may for the first time definitely be ascertained to be of a telepathic nature.9 In this chapter, I am interested in telepathy as symptomatic of a psychological process described by Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott as the manic defense.10 By this term, Winnicott in an essay of 1935 refers to the fantasies of omnipotence that enable the analysand to keep at bay intense depressive anxiety. In turn, Winnicott describes depressive anxiety as the sense of being internally empty or dead.11 This state arises as an aspect of what he calls “inner reality,” the realm of part-object and object-relations internalized in infancy that to a large extent constitute the individual’s psychic life. Most importantly, these objects are usually one’s parents as objects of love-hate; but Winnicott suggests that they may also include other relations: for example, to God for a religious person or to “inspiration” for an artist.12 Had Freud made these last comments, he would quickly have translated them into Oedipal terms. Winnicott, however, writing as a contemporary of Freud, recognized that object-relations can exist in social and cultural dimensions that do not merely offer substitutive repetitions of primary relations. Jacques Derrida capitalizes on this possibility in his essay, “Telepathy,” which is written in the voice of Freud. Miming the Oedipal relationship of son to father, Derrida sees the concept of telepathy and the late-Victorian, early twentieth-century, fascination with it as fashioning a technology whereby one can imagine the unconscious as porous

Wilde and Hitchcock   51 to unpredetermined incursions from other subjects and discursive positions. Luckhurst writes: “Telepathy is…used by Derrida as a lever, which, like the spectre, specifically breaches the isolation of the One, inserting a heterogeneous foreign body into the isolate ontogenetic unconscious, such that there is no coming into subjectivity without coming to be haunted by the other, voices simultaneously distant (tele) and intimate (the pathos of touching affect) housed in, even constitutive of the unconscious.” In Derrida’s words, the unconscious is now seen as a “kind of je anonyme through which passes messages which may or may not originate there.”13 The Victorian and modernist examples discussed in this chapter occur between 1887 and 1927. All three involve Oscar Wilde although, in the final example, my interest is in Wilde’s afterlife as a specter haunting London’s West End and the artists who performed there. Wilde’s ‘return’ to this scene occurs through the ministrations of Ivor Novello, like Wilde an openly gay, successful West-End playwright. In addition, as a matinee idol, Novello trumped Wilde’s earlier celebrity. Novello stars in Downhill, which Hitchcock based on a play that Novello originally co-wrote with Constance Collier under the pseudonym, “David L’Estrange.”14 Hitchcock, England’s most advanced film director at the time, took a hand in adapting this series of theatrical sketches for the screen. Tom Ryall points out that sequences both in Hitchcock’s preceding film with Novello, The Lodger, and a wellknown stream-of-consciousness sequence in Downhill, indicate the director’s fascination at the time with “depicting the interior life of the mind”15 (Ryall, 25). While this “interior life” is not synonymous with Winnicott’s “inner reality,” Hitchcock’s interest indicates his willingness to trace the porous membrane between the emerging classic narrative form of commercial cinema and avant-garde experimentation in current filmmaking. Through screenings at the recently founded London Film Society (Ryall, 10–13), he was able to see experimental Surrealist and Dadaist work from France that played with the narrative structure of dreams and other forms of unconscious mental activity (Ryall, 25–26). At the Society he likewise was able to see classic German Expressionist films. Hitchcock’s interest in these matters, however, is not only formal. His close involvement in the making of both films implicates him in both Wilde’s and Novello’s perversity. In considering Hitchcock’s relation to this material, it is useful to consider how the contemporary French writer, Colette, negotiated her relationship with sexually dissident culture in bohemian Paris. Michael Lucey in Never Say I demonstrates how, in her early writing, Colette was able to write in the first person in such a way as to affiliate herself with dissident (and perverse) social and cultural surrounds without thereby laying claim to a particular minority identity. The following citation suggests the kind of intimate investment that Hitchcock had with Novello and other sexual dissidents with whom

52  Wilde and Hitchcock he worked in the 1920s and later but with this difference: namely, that young Colette despite the disclaimer below engaged in unconventional sexual experimentation while Hitchcock did not. Colette writes: Montmartre was splitting at the seams with these individuals who seemed to belong to no known sex, whose only care was pleasure, and who—in certain ways, and within certain limits which, believe me, I never felt tempted to exceed—corresponded to my secret nature, to my obscure leanings. And so later I could say, ‘Jésus-laCaille c’est moi.’… It was less a question of telling the story of a certain kind of behavior than of giving way to the consequences of that behavior, as if in the throes of a kind of altered state in which my consciousness remained intact and yet which was also a kind of hallucination.16 Colette’s examples deal with both fatality and telepathic communication. Wilde, Novello, and Hitchcock likewise deal in fantasies of mastery of the social surround as well as with pressing urgencies of inner existence. In all three instances, agents seek to control their fate by narrativizing it. Doing so, they seek control of their relation to external reality. But the panic with which they engage in this effort indicates the strength of underlying anxiety. None of the three is able to escape this double bind. The protagonists encounter their fates in moments of telepathic transfer. The first example recounts Wilde’s autobiographical experience in two encounters with the well-known palm reader, Cheiro. The second recurs to an earlier short story by Wilde in which the protagonist’s fate is determined as a result of a palmist’s prediction. In the film, telepathic transfer is registered visually as Novello’s character, Roddy Berwick, spews forth the (silent) story of his own downfall as he stares into the mesmeric gaze of a mercenary sexual predator. The narrative and implicitly Roddy’s downfall are both signified and caused by this exchange. All three moments are symptomatic of manic defense against the undoing of personal agency in face of the imperative fantasies of one’s own inner reality. Manic defense is further registered in Wilde’s amazing literary productivity of the early 1890s, his ability to write a series of highly successful plays in quick succession, his extravagant lifestyle, his exhibitionistic sexual gourmandise, and the public drama of his entanglement, both destructive and self-destructive, with Lord Alfred Douglas. In Wilde’s short story, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” manic defense is registered in the comic character of the story itself. In the early 1890s, Wilde responded to the complex situation in which he found himself by arranging to have his palm read by Cheiro. Responding with a narrative of double fatality, Cheiro accurately predicted both great success and a sudden fall for the playwright. On April 19,

Wilde and Hitchcock   53 1893, the evening of the successful premiere of A Woman of No Importance, Wilde dined at the home of Blanche Roosevelt. Roosevelt had arranged for Cheiro, placed behind a curtain so that he could not identify the other guests, to read their palms. When he read Wilde’s, he was taken aback: “I pointed this case out as an example where the left [hand] had promised the most unusual destiny of brilliancy and uninterrupted success, which was completely broken and ruined at a certain date in the right. Almost forgetting myself for a moment, I summed up all by saying, ‘the left hand is the hand of a king, but the right that of a king who will send himself into exile.’”17 Cheiro explained the difference by saying that “the left hand denotes hereditary tendencies and the right hand individual developments.”18 Cheiro’s neat distinction between left and right hand conserves a key ambiguity that attends the prophetic arts, an idea of the present as a continuing effect of a still living past as well as a space in which agency exists whereby an individual may shape their future. This ambiguity attends all three instances of telepathic transfer discussed in this chapter. Indeed, in the case of the example from Downhill, Roddy’s encounter with an ambiguously gendered other operates retroactively so as to explain how and why Roddy has been ejected from the respectable settings of an upper-class family, male homosocial friendship, and a public school education. In a popular handbook on palmistry, published originally in 1897, Cheiro focuses on the ethical problem of prediction. Arguing for the scientific character of palm-reading, he claims that “palmistry…becomes a study not contrary to the dictates of reason, but in accordance with those natural laws that we observe in the shaping of even inanimate objects, which, by demonstrating the effect of a heretofore cause, are in themselves the cause of a hereafter effect.”19 Acknowledging the theological implications of his view in support of the Anglican doctrine of predestination, Cheiro argues on both scientific and religious grounds that the causal effects of individual human acts require that individuals exercise moral responsibility in making them. 20 Even when a sequence of events occurs as a result of a series of individual choices, it may be the case that the first choice made acts as cause of the remainder. Wilde probably would have agreed with this point of view. In a state of intense depression immediately before the first of his trials in 1895, he sought out Cheiro to ask whether his hand still showed a “breach in his line of destiny.” When the palmist attempted to reassure Wilde, he responded: “My good friend, you know well Fate does not keep road-menders on her highways.”21 Cheiro proved himself to be a real friend of Wilde. Following his conviction and imprisonment, Wilde was frequently snubbed by former friends and acquaintances. Cheiro acted differently. One evening in Paris, when he noticed Wilde seated in a restaurant, he came over

54  Wilde and Hitchcock to greet him. In the title poem of a book of poems published in 1895, Cheiro writes: If we only knew how the man we spurn Had fought temptation—ay, day and night; If we only knew, would we so turn And cast him off as a loathsome sight? Ah me! instead of the sinner’s brand, We’d gladly help him the right to do; We’d lift him up with each honest hand, If we only knew—if we only knew!22 Cheiro’s anti-judgmental, anti-dogmatic humanism may have had a basis in the sense of a shared background and vulnerability. Like Wilde though younger, Cheiro was an Irishman who had reinvented himself as an entertainer as a means of winning celebrity and success in England. Born William John Warner, Cheiro later dubbed himself Count Louis Hamon. 23 The phrase, “a race of kings,” is one traditionally attached to the Irish along with the notion of personal, national, and racial dispossession, viz., precisely the double fate that Cheiro ascribed to Wilde. Cheiro casts his prophetic art within the ambit of an evolutionary science whose goal is the progressive development of the human race: the brain influences the hand, which in turn influences the course of human development. 24 “Is there anything so very absurd,” he asks, “in supporting a doctrine of fate, which it is logical to suppose exists, [even] if we only take it from the standpoint of the repetition of events from natural causes?”25 Wilde responded to Cheiro’s original prediction with a combination of accelerated productivity together with increasingly reckless behavior, masking credulous terror. The combination is anticipated in “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” published several years earlier in 1887. In the story, the protagonist is an attractive young man, about to marry, who is induced to have his palm read at a fashionable party. The palm reader predicts fatality for the sitter, viz., the fact that he will commit a murder. Driven by a sense of fate combined with an intense desire to maintain his (and his fiancée’s) respectability, Lord Savile embarks on a string of hilariously unsuccessful attempts to perform the perfect crime. He finally manages to do so by taking advantage of a chance encounter to murder the unsuspecting palmist. The fact that the palmist fails to anticipate that he himself will become the young man’s victim ironically indicates the limits of his clairvoyance. Nor does the palmist take the extra step that Freud takes in analyzing mediumistic predictions by recognizing that the prediction masks an unconscious wish on Savile’s part. How would one analyze this prediction in psychoanalytic terms? In “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” Freud says that the telepathic

Wilde and Hitchcock   55 communications of most interest for psychoanalytic purposes are those that turn out to be false. 26 He cites as an example a story told him by a patient who had consulted a fortune-teller. The woman incorrectly predicted that the young man’s brother-in-law would die of seafood poisoning in the coming summer. Freud infers that the fortune-teller, operating in this context as “a true ‘medium’” (184) had tapped into her subject’s unconscious wishes. Freud’s patient “had an only sister a few years his junior, to whom he was wholeheartedly and quite undisguisedly devoted. ‘Why is it we can’t get married’? they had often asked each other. But their affection had never gone beyond the point permissible between brothers and sisters” (182). Freud deduced that the fortune teller had repeated unawares the young man’s unconscious wish that his rival, whom he knew to have a habit of eating shellfish out of season, be removed by this means from the scene (185). As in other examples cited by Freud, the concealed wish is incestuous. If one were to bring a similar perspective to Wilde’s short story, one could find in it an Oedipal drama, in which the palmist plays the archaic role of the father as the symbolic figure who both controls access to jouissance and denies it to his son by means of the incest taboo. In this respect, one would need additionally to know or at least to infer that Savile’s fiancée reminded him so strongly of a mother whom he adored that his proposal was directed toward enabling the young woman to substitute for the mother whom convention forbade him to marry. At some level, however, the young man was troubled by the incestuous character of his wish. Killing the palmist who substituted for his father held the promise of freeing the young man of a burden of unconscious guilt and thereby permitting him to marry his future wife with a clear conscience. Of course, one might also read the story in other ways, for example, in terms of what John Kucich refers to as social desire.27 Savile’s panicky willingness to commit a crime in order to protect his social position and that of his bride-to-be suggests the willingness of members of the upper classes to take whatever steps necessary so as to maintain their privileged position. Traditionally, in both Christian and Classical moral satire, aristocratic privilege was seen to find its origin in criminal behavior. As well, one might see the prediction as revealing an unconscious wish on the part of the handsome young aristocrat to avoid both marriage and sex with a woman. In this context, marriage and the propriety that attends it could be the fate that Savile wishes to avoid, and the crime that he consciously fears might taint his bride may conceal an unconscious wish for her murder, a death that would free him from a lifetime of lawful pleasure. If Savile were to share Wilde’s own discomfort with marriage and his interest in sex and romance with a young man, then the crime that threatens Savile’s future might be that of a sexually dissident entanglement, a sort of metaphoric murder of the imperative to heterosexual jouissance and an opening to a kind of unregulated pleasure that

56  Wilde and Hitchcock threatens to bypass and subvert the father’s symbolic regulation of access to the object of desire. In this case, the murder of the palmist might symptomatically substitute for the murder of Savile’s own father, the hateful figure who stands in the way of the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure. Or the murder of the palmist might unconsciously defend Savile against incestuous desire for his own father. Oedipal desire need not be directed only toward the parent of the opposite sex. Regardless of which of these analyses one might prefer, the series of murder attempts clumsily undertaken by Savile constitute a manic defense against the depressive anxieties that he experiences upon the threshold of marriage. Novello’s biographer reports that, unlike Wilde, Novello was at ease, privately and publicly, with what today might be referred to as his gay sexuality. After five years of schooling at Magdalen College Choir School (Wilde had attended Magdalen College as an undergraduate at Oxford), 28 Novello, lacking financial means to enroll in University, dallied in theatre and popular music for a number of years until he scored his first commercial hit with a song, “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” that quickly became a World War I anthem. 29 Shortly afterwards, Novello fell under the protective and supportive influence of Eddie Marsh, a well-connected gay mentor, at one time private secretary to Winston Churchill, friend of Somerset Maugham and companion to both Novello and Noel Coward following the disastrous opening night of their production of Sirocco (November 24, 1927), when raucous theater-goers found Novello’s efforts to play a passionate Latin lover wanting.30 It was Marsh who introduced Novello to Bobbie Andrews, the young actor who became Novello’s lifelong companion.31 Downhill makes clear that Novello was simultaneously aware of the sort of anxieties that accompanied Wilde during his period of celebrity and that Hitchcock, with his fetish for the “golden curls” of young models, dancers, and actresses, visualized from the start to the end of his career as a filmmaker.32 In the film, Roddy’s threatened fall is figured in the mode of obsessive selfconfession. Here the fear is specifically gendered as castration anxiety resulting from being held within the force field of the consuming gaze of a mannish woman—or a womanish man. Though my suggestion is that contemporary sexual politics structures Roddy’s combination of manic defense and depressive anxiety, here too there is an archaic Oedipal register. Novello, who took his mother’s middle name as his stage name, remained very close to her throughout his life. A music impresario and teacher of voice, “Mam” developed an intensely competitive attitude toward her son. As he achieved fame and wealth, she made extravagant claims on his resources to assume the costs of her various get-rich-quick schemes. Responding to her demands with extraordinary grace, Novello quietly paid off the debts.33 In the diegesis of the film, Julia (Isabel Jeans), the blonde actress with whom Roddy becomes infatuated before being forced to leave England,

Wilde and Hitchcock   57 uses an unexpected inheritance that he has received to pay off her extravagant debts. Roddy, insolvent, arrives in Paris, where he supports himself by working as a dancer and companion to well-to-do women. At the dance hall, he meets the Poetess, a masculinized, post-menopausal woman, who embraces him in her telepathic field of force. Oedipal reference is underscored by occasions in the film when Roddy must hand over his earnings to an older woman, for example, the middle-aged woman who manages the dance hall. The film’s best-known sequence, a stream-of-consciousness exploration of Roddy’s mind in a feverish state, includes a shot in which the Poetess with other exploiters of Roddy gleefully count stacks of paper money while mocking him. Indeed, the motif of paying for other people’s pleasures (and vices) is basic both to the plot and to many incidents in the film. Novello tended to assume the debts of others. In the most damaging instance, he was sent to jail for four weeks in spring, 1944, for violating wartime prescriptions against the private use of motor vehicles. Access to transport had been provided by an avid fan, Dora Grace Constable, who posed under the name of Grace Walton as a manager of a firm engaged in the war effort (172). After Novello signed over his Rolls Royce to the firm, Walton unexpectedly offered him the use of the car on weekends to drive back and forth from a local railway station to his country home. When her illegal appropriation of the vehicle and actual status as a minor clerk (172) were revealed, she and Novello were both arrested on a charge of “unlawful conspiracy to commit offences against the Motor Vehicles (Restriction of Use) Order 1942.”34 By a coincidence of language almost too apt to be accidental, the presiding magistrate invoked the Restriction of Use rule to sentence Novello, whose sexual nonconformity was well known, to jail. It is curious too that this same official, a veteran of World War I, should be sentencing to prison the author of England’s most successful wartime song. At trial, Novello made a poor witness in his own defense. Miss ­Constable, also charged, made a better choice in not taking the stand. Her statement to the police put Novello in the worst possible light. “He is trying to put all the blame on me,” she complained. “He was willing to do anything crooked so long as he had use of the car.”35 The magistrate found both defendants guilty and fined Constable 50 pounds but sent Novello to prison. Novello achieved further stage successes after completing his sentence but never regained the weight he had lost in prison nor fully overcame the shame of this debacle. As though caught in a relay of telepathic transfers, the film itself forecasts its star’s later fiasco. This prolepsis, however, is retroactive since Novello’s imprisonment replays that of Wilde a generation earlier. With the success of his plays in the early 1890s, Wilde also unexpectedly found himself in the money, much of which he squandered on Douglas, a glamorous, aristocratic youth at odds with his father, who ran up extravagant debts

58  Wilde and Hitchcock at Wilde’s expense. When, after imprisonment on charges of gross obscenity, Wilde left England, Douglas too went to France. Novello’s later embarrassments enact a sort of unconscious homage to Wilde—as do Douglas’s, who, after much effort, finally managed to get himself briefly imprisoned in 1924. These echoes do not refer simply to the psychology of a single person—nor even to that of a specific group of males. The narrative of triumph and repeated downfalls that structures Downhill incorporates in the film a narrative of the “Decadent” 1890s, identified with the name of Wilde, albeit without avowing the Wildean example. William Butler Yeats claimed this profile to be shared by his fellow poets of the Rhymers’ Club, “whom he… memorialized (and mythologized) in his autobiography as ‘The Tragic Generation.’”36 In this regard, historical material appears within the diegesis as a disavowed and in that sense repressed pattern. In a film that repeatedly and variously signifies its modernity, Hitchcock introduces a melodramatic plot based on the leading media sensation of the 1880s, the Jack the Ripper murders. Here again, the chronological transposition from the fin de siècle to the 1920s is both crucial and unacknowledged. And here too, sexual dissidence, both male homosexual and queer, is attached to the character played by Novello. During the period of the murders, Novello turns up at an East End lodging-house, identified in the credits only as “The Lodger.” Suspense in the film hinges on his ambiguous connection with the ongoing mayhem. Fighting her own suspicions as to the Lodger’s role in the murders, the Landlady at one point tells her husband: “I know he is queer, but he is a gentleman.” Here the word queer connotes misogyny, sexual perversion, and criminal identification. In this way, Hitchcock connects his leading man with both Victorian crime and Victorian perversion. This double incorporation of the Victorian past again suggests how both films repeat the past in such a way as to ensure that it works strictly sensationally and not in a mode of analysis or interpretation. This repetition contradicts the modernity of the film, unwittingly disclosing the fact that modernity, as Hitchcock experiences and fashions it, continues obsessively to reenact a Victorian past. Contemporaneity is itself historic in these films while the representation of Victorian history remains strictly symptomatic. Allusions to Wilde’s fall are carried in other ways as well. Consider, for instance, the identification of the man-woman in the scenario as “the Poetess,” played by Violet Farebrother.37 In his edition of Wilde’s poetry, Ian Small makes clear that Wilde worked hard in the 1880s and 1890s to acquire a reputation as a poet since he believed that title to be the most direct route to literary respectability.38 Seen in the glare of morning light following the dance, the Poetess, in the words of Marc Raymond Strauss, is revealed to be what the press claimed Wilde to be at the time of the trials: namely, “a frightening-looking vampire, dark circles under

Wilde and Hitchcock   59 her eyes and black lipstick dripping down her mouth”39 (55). Wildean allusions occur as well in other incidents and visual metaphors, for example, in a scene in a pastry shop, “Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe” near the beginning of the film. In this sequence, Roddy is covering for his roommate and best friend at school, who is engaged with Mabel (Annette Benson), the shop girl, in her apartment, into which the back of the shop opens. Dancing with Roddy earlier in the scene, Mabel has made it clear that she prefers him to his friend. But Roddy backs off. This act of gentlemanly self-control—which in the film looks more like a lack of heterosexual interest or even a reflex of controlled repulsion—sets up Roddy for his initial downfall since he is thrown out of school when the girl, having become pregnant, vindictively accuses him rather than his roommate as being responsible. The matinee idol, Novello, is situated in the ambiguous position of having put himself in the wrong by rejecting the wiles of a working-class vamp. The real cause of his downfall, however, is his failure to have shown interest in the girl.40 While Roddy waits for his friend to complete his business with Mabel, a young street urchin enters the shop. When he longingly eyes candy that he can’t afford, Roddy buys him chocolate. A few minutes later, the boy returns, his face now smeared with cork/charcoal/chocolate/merde. Other street urchins accompany him, all seeking goodies from Roddy. The stains on the boy’s face call to mind other stains—for example, fecal stains on sheets at the Savoy hotel—that helped convict Wilde of gross obscenity in 1895.41 Wilde privately claimed that the chambermaids who testified against him had confused in their memories his bedroom with that of Lord Alfred Douglas, who had been enjoying sex with rent boys. Although this information had not yet appeared in print in 1927, such associations seem to me to be intended to be received subliminally by the audience while they are conscious to Hitchcock, Novello, and the production team, aware as they were of the threats of scandal that hovered over prominent bisexual and homosexual figures of West End theater. In Downhill, the technology of telepathic transfer takes the form of the mesmeric gaze directed by “the Poetess”—a mannish middle-aged matron to a young dancer-for-hire in a Parisian dance hall. The woman is shot so as strongly to resemble a cross-dressed male. Under the impress of her gaze, the fictional character played by Novello tells the story of his downhill course from public schoolboy hero to gigolo. To be held in this woman’s telepathic force field becomes one image of Roddy’s fate. The encounter conflates one kind of perversion, implicit passive homosexuality, with another, the perversion of falling under magnetic influence, in psychoanalytic terms fantasies of inner reality, fear of being consumed by the other. Downhill was a star vehicle for Novello both on stage and in film. Hence there is—as with the Wilde material—a strong autobiographical register to the film. Equally marked, moreover, is the significance of the

60  Wilde and Hitchcock film as a social symptom, one that is anachronistic in its not very hidden recall of the success and failure of an earlier West End male homosexual celebrity, whose disgrace continues to attach to the open secrets of fashionable society, its members and their pastimes. Epistemologically, the film is anachronistic in its use of the Victorian technology of the mesmeric gaze to signify unconscious mental activity in a decade during which Freudian analysis had already become a familiar part of enlightened middle-class culture in England. However, the film is also not anachronistic since psychoanalytic material registers visibly in the play of light and shadow on the cinema screen. Downhill was released following a period of sexual experimentation in London between 1924 and 1926 that is signaled in the early novels of Radclyffe Hall and epitomized in the contents, textual and visual, of the English edition of Vogue under the direction of Dorothy Toddy, its Sapphist editor, and Madge Garland, her assistant editor and domestic partner.42 Succeeding plays, films, and fictions register the neo-Wildean environment of London at the time. One example, drawn from the beginning of Anthony Asquith’s second feature film, Underground (1928), is provided by the comic appearance of a mannish middle-aged woman in a uniform that recalls that of the controversial Women’s Police Service. With a darkening tone, Patrick Hamilton a year later wrote an obviously Wildean protagonist into his dramatic psychological thriller, Rope, which Hitchcock himself later adapted to the screen in 1948. Then too, there is the obscenity trial that followed the publication of Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, also in 1928. These examples indicate both the increased publicity of sexual dissidence and heightened concern about phobic public reactions in the final years of the decade.43 In the display and in the anxiety, English theater and film continued to pay homage to an absent but scarcely dead progenitor. While this chapter has focused on Ivor Novello as haunted by the specter of Wilde, I have also noted that Novello and Hitchcock collaborated in fashioning the scenario from the stage play. While it is important to recognize that Hitchcock’s was a collective signature, including close collaboration with his cinematographer, Bernard Knowles, his wife, Alma Reville, and others, Downhill has an important, hitherto unrecognized place in the mapping of Hitchcock’s oeuvre and position as an auteur, a development which was already discernible before The Lodger and his other films prior to Downhill went into general release.44 Ryall ascribes the originality of the Hitchcock thriller to its combination of a paranoid sense of the collapse of familiar discursive systems with a reassertion of order in the form of a united heterosexual couple by the end of the film. In this way, the characters of the leading man and woman are clarified and affirmed. In his study of the sextet of thrillers, beginning with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and ending with

Wilde and Hitchcock   61 The Lady Vanishes (1938), Ryall points out the seemingly contradictory fact that Hitchcock’s individuality as a director is based on his identification with a particular film genre. Genre itself is usually understood by critics of film as a necessary aspect of the industrial system of studio production. Ryall squares this circle by finding two defining elements within Hitchcock’s version of the thriller, which Ryall calls the romance-thriller (137). The first element is what Peter Wollen describes as the sense of “the proximity of the chaos world” that Hitchcock’s protagonists discover as they are thrown into the vortex of international espionage.45 What Hitchcock adds to this paranoid narrative is the simultaneous construction within the film of a heterosexual couple as dual heroic protagonist. In Ryall’s words, “the primary emphasis of the films is on the romantic encounter and the development of the relationship between the leading characters played, however, through the suspenseful and dangerous diegetic world of the thriller” (137). Ryall, however, does not think to link the elements of chaos and consolidated heterosexual identity within the logic of a sex-gender system. In this respect, Downhill gains an important place within Hitchcock’s work by visualizing the linkage between the two. In his exchange of glances with the Poetess, Roddy/Novello renders visible the homosexual panic that structures, in terms of gender and sexuality, the chaos experienced by the protagonist and, vicariously, by those watching in the audience. Homosexual panic, however, is only one aspect of a more basic uncertainty about the stability of the distinction between the two sexes. In his study of North by Northwest and other late Hitchcock films, Lee Edelman has emphasized how Hitchcock’s scenarios contrast the reassertion of heterosexual temporality against the anarchic incursions of homosexually perverse villains.46 A film like Downhill, however, tells against too ideological a reading of Hitchcock’s films. Temporality in these films is fissured by a play of unconscious attraction and aggression that renders narrative, including closure, continually ambivalent. In this chapter, I have emphasized that this psychic dynamism occurs within culture and history, shaping as it is shaped by past effects that operate as present causes.

Notes 1 Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, 33; Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 134–135; Wiliams, The Politics of Modernism, 32. 2 Harding, Ivor Novello, 72. References to Harding in text and notes are to this work. 3 Rowlinson, “Theory of Victorian Studies,” 251 (my interpolations). 4 Freud, “A Note,” 315. 5 Ibid., 312–313. For a glossary of terminology used by Society researchers, see Myers, Human Personality, xiii–xxii. 6 Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 70. Unless otherwise cited, page references to Luckhurst refer to this text.

62  Wilde and Hitchcock 7 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 175. 8 Quoted by Luckhurst, “Something Tremendous, Something Elemental,” 54—hereafter cited in notes as Luckhurst, 1999. 9 219. 10 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 114, 298–299. 11 Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis,” 130, 131. 12 Ibid., 129, 130, 132–33. 13 Luckhurst, 1999, 56–57. 14 Harding, 71. The pseudonym captures the sense of (self-)estrangement that exists within the telepathic experience of direct access to the subjectivity of another. In male homosexual and Sapphic argot in the early twentieth century, the term “David” refers to a boyish young male or female homosexual. See “David and Jonathan,” text and illustration, Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds, following Dedication page. 15 Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema, 25. 16 Cited in Lucey, 149. 17 McKenna, 229. 18 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 360. 19 Cheiro, Cheiro’s Language of the Hand, vi. 20 Ibid., 9, 21. 21 McKenna, 357. 22 Cheiro, 3. 23 www.solsticepoint.com/astrologersmemorial/cheiro.html 24 Cheiro, 17. 25 Ibid., 20. 26 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 190. Subsequent page references to Freud in the paragraph are to this essay. 27 Social desire is a phrase used by John Kucich in The Power of Lies to refer to the typically middle-class aspiration to improve one’s status and material well-being. Kucich sees this desire to be a major motive operating in middlebrow Victorian fiction such as that of Anthony Trollope. For Trollope, the goal of social desire includes the achievement of success in terms of marriage and career. At the same time, Trollope maintains that individual behavior should be disinterested in character. The two mandates are discontinuous. Kucich argues that the tension, at times contradiction, between the two sets of expectations is reflected in the lies, often implicit, of some of Trollope’s morally good characters. Here I use the phrase to refer to the desire of members of the British aristocracy in the late Victorian period to defend their threatened position of privilege within the society. Wilde satirizes a central tension in Victorian middle-class culture by shifting it to the aristocracy, a group to which ­middle-class Victorians were likely to consider themselves morally superior. In the story, Wilde contrasts Savile’s desire to marry with his willingness to commit a major crime in order to protect his determination to wed. In Chapter 9, I use the phrase in a different sense to refer to single women in England and India in the twentieth century who choose to sublimate desire in the form of social service to others. 28 Ellmann, 36–37; Harding, 15–18. 29 Harding, 27–30. 30 Novello also starred in an unsuccessful silent film version of Coward’s The Vortex, a play and a role in which Coward implied his own homosexuality (Harding, 72–73).

Wilde and Hitchcock   63















Bibliography Cheiro. [Count Louis Hamon] Cheiro’s Language of the Hand. 1897. Reprint. New York: Rand, McNally & Co, 1910. ———. If We Only Knew and Other Poems. London: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895. Dellamora, Richard. Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ———. Radclyffe Hall, A Life in the Writing. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Doan, Laura. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001. Doan, Laura, and Jay Prosser, jt. ed. Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness Past and Present. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1987. Freud, Sigmund. “Dreams and Telepathy.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1971–1974. 18: 196–220. ———. “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 26 (November 1912): 312–318. ———. “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1971–1974. 18: 175–193.

64  Wilde and Hitchcock Harding, James. Ivor Novello. [Wales] : Welsh Academic Press, 1997. Hoare, Philip. Noel Coward: A Biography. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995. Isherwood, Charles. “2 Dilettantes Enjoy a Spot of Recreational Homicide.” New York Times, December 5, 2005, B5. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity. 2002. Reprint. London: Verso, 2012. Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994. Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith and introd. Daniel Lagache. New York: Norton, 1973. Lucey, Michael. Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. ———. “‘Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’: On the Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis.” In Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Pp. 50–71. McKenna, Neil. The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. London: Random House, 2003. Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004. Myers, Frederic W[illiam] H[enry]. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Introd Gardner Murphy. Volume 1. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Reed, Christopher. Design for (Queer) Living: Sexual Identity, Performance, and Decor in British Vogue.” GLQ, 12.3 (2006): 377–403. Rowlinson, Matthew. “Theory of Victorian Studies: Anachronism and SelfReflexivity.” Victorian Studies, 47.2 (Winter 2005): 241–252. Ryall, Tom. Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema. With a new introduction. London: Athlone Press, 1996. Shaw, Robert B. “Tragic Generations.” Poetry, 175.3 (January 2000): 210–219. Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Small, Ian. Introduction. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Russell Jackson and Ian Small. Volume 1. Poems and Poems in Prose. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000. Strauss, Marc Raymond. Alfred Hitchcock’s Silent Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989. Winnicott, D. W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

3

History and Revolution in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show

I The turn to the countryside in the culture of the 1890s and the early twentieth century is a significant phenomenon within modernity. At the turn of the century, writers on both the left and the right tended to acknowledge contemporary reality, symbolized in cities such as New York, Chicago, Paris, and London, as characterized by material progress, technological innovation, and the advancement of civilization. At the same time, the instruments of modern civilization were perceived by writers such as Nordau as threatening the health of bodies—individual, national, racial, and imperial.1 In England, the leading example of such degeneration was at hand in the Cockney and Jewish slums of London’s East End. Modernity, then, posed a double challenge: the challenge of fashioning an ever more complex and rewarding civilization and the simultaneous need to escape or at the least to mitigate the tendency toward regression. Given this tension, another possibility beckoned: namely, that an investment in rustic existence might turn the itinerant urban visitor into an intent participant-observer of contemporary conditions with an eye to the historical bases of rural poverty and inequality. This historical interest might issue, in turn, in an alternative view of the political present and future. In this context, the turn to the countryside contained within itself a prompt to the critique both of political economy and of one’s own outsider stance in village life. In this chapter, I focus on how this transformation took place for two women in the early 1930s. One of them is Valentine Ackland. In a decade when the representation of the working class focused on industrial workers and their families, Ackland published a series of articles on rural economy in the influential small magazine, Left Review, followed by Country Conditions (1936). The second woman is her lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose response to living in the country with Ackland was to write Summer Will Show (1936), an important if often overlooked work of modernist fiction. The first half of the novel is set on a country estate in England during the 1840s, the latter part in Paris during the February and June revolutions

66  Summer Will Show of 1848. Begun in 1932 and completed in 1936, the novel invites immediate contextualization in the Great Depression in England (1929–1932) and the rise of militant Fascism on the Continent. For both Ackland and Warner, life in rural Norfolk and Dorset led dialectically to the past, whence a sense of radical communitarian purpose proceeded to the future. 2 What might have become a nostalgic idyll became instead a self-conscious turn to history, in particular to Victorian history, in search of a usable past. Such a use of the past involves not only looking at the present in new ways, it also involves reflexive choices about which Victorian past is seen to count. These choices, moreover, are hermeneutic, based on the reading of specific nineteenth-century texts to specific ends. The extent to which such choices can challenge conventional understandings of what “Victorian” means is suggested by the fact that the writers who came to matter most for both women in the 1930s are Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. For Ackland, Engels is in particular the author of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Ackland wrote a participant-observer ethnographic study of contemporary working and living conditions in the rural south of England that references nineteenth-century England in three different contexts. The most obvious one to anticipate is the agricultural depression of the 1870s, brought about by the import of cheap grain from the American prairies. The change resulted in a drop in the population of rural laborers while introducing a permanent reduction in their living standards. Ackland argues that the sense of self-worth of those remaining behind likewise declined: “The ordinary labourer has endured for his whole lifetime a perfectly constant ‘Great Slump,’ and the result is a deadening depression. He cannot see any hope in the future; it can hardly occur to him to look for it. Things have ‘always’ been hopeless, whatever changes there may have been in the Government or outside world.”3 Laborers worked alone for the most of days that often began and ended in the dark. The solitariness of this work together with poor pay prompted loneliness, passivity, and deepened depression. In a number of chapters, each devoted to describing a typical day of work by one of a number of laborers, Ackland details the specifics underlying her general conclusions. Despite this emphasis on the decline in the rural economy since the 1870s, the book begins with Ackland observing that although the quality of life of workers in towns had improved over the past century, “labourers, with their families, live under worse conditions, by comparison with town workers, than they did in 1840” (7). 1840 references a decade that saw both the rise and fall of Chartism, a primarily workingclass “mass movement for liberal reform,”4 and widespread misery among workers in Great Britain and Ireland. As well, the 1840s is the decade in which Engels first visited England, researched the condition of industrial workers and their families in Manchester, and published The Condition of the Working Class in England. It’s worth considering

Summer Will Show  67 the dates of the first English-language editions of Engels’ work: 1887 in the United States and 1892 in England, dates which made the book, for a writer like Ackland, a late Victorian phenomenon associated with working-class socialist agitation in the 1880s and 1890s. Since the publication of these editions, Engels book has been, in Eric Howbsbawm’s words “familiar to every student of the Industrial Revolution, if only by name.”5 The work begins with an Introduction in which Engels provides an equivocal portrait of living conditions in the English countryside before the onset of industrialism in the eighteenth century: “The workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors…. But”—and it is a large but—“intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping though mankind. They were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings.”6 Ackland draws from Engels a similar sense of the inherent cultural limitations of rural existence, but the main link is with his reportage of rural poverty in 1844. At the beginning of the chapter on village life, Ackland quotes from Engels’s book: “What sort of life these people lead may be imagined; their food scanty and bad, their clothing ragged, their dwellings cramped and desolate, small wretched huts, with no comforts whatsoever.... And not from one or two special districts of England do such reports come. On the contrary, the distress is general” (13). Proceeding to cite two more recent studies, the “Report of the Land Enquiry Committee” of 1913 and England’s Green and Pleasant Land (1926), Ackland shifts into the first person: “Yesterday I examined four cottages in this village” (14), etc. This “I” sees the present through the prism of Engels’ book. Along with emphasis on the effects of economic realities on the character of individual workers, their wives, and children, Ackland also analyzes the realities of class warfare in the countryside.7 Laborers own no land and rent the miserable cottages in which they live. Loss of a job usually means loss of one’s dwelling too. Farmers, drawn from the working class but defined by their economic position as leaseholders of estate-owned land, look down on their hires as lacking ambition and resource. At the same time, the principal way in which farmers can protect or increase their income is by reducing the already inadequate wages of their employees. Hence, the two groups are necessarily in competition for scarce resources. On the other side, the gentry flatter farmers with a condescending congeniality while farmers in turn curry favor with the landowners upon whom their leaseholds depend. At times, Ackland speaks about farmers as though they were kulaks in need of being

68  Summer Will Show eliminated before economic equality can be introduced. At the end of the chapter on farmers, however, she holds open the possibility that their precarious financial situation may eventually drive them to make common cause with unionized agricultural laborers (78). Ackland invokes a third nineteenth-century point of reference in the Kent riots of 1830. In this uprising, rural craftsmen, farm laborers, and paupers protested against low pay and unemployment.8 Ackland needed this moment, the only one in English history when a successful working-class revolt might have been possible, in order to situate current misery in a hypothetical narrative of improvement.9 The political self-consciousness and courage of workers in the past offered a specifically English situation that could be linked, in 1936, to the glowing reports of the recent collectivization of agricultural production in Soviet Russia (Ackland, Appendix VI). Ackland looked backwards to find a basis for signs that the demoralized remnant of the rural population might somehow recover “that stubborn, independent spirit that in 1830 made the Kentish labourers so formidable to the ruling class” (9). She believed that, if only rural workers and lease-hold farmers could recover “the mode of combining” (12) both together and with industrial workers, “the land,” to repeat her phrase, “will be saved” (78).10 In the book, Ackland also focuses on the role of laborers’ wives, who she found worked, if anything, longer and harder hours than their husbands and who, in every case that she discusses, managed, usually against long odds, the family budget. She also includes a chapter devoted to politicking in the general election of 1935 in order to demonstrate the effective exclusion of rural workers from parliamentary suffrage. And she frequently calls out those who exploit workers or who are indifferent to their fates, a group among whom she includes what she derisively calls “the weekender” (11), the visitor from the city who comes to the country in order to enjoy the privacy, low rents, and traditional picturesqueness of village existence.

II Summer Will Show appeared in 1936, the same year as Ackland’s book. During the four years in which Warner worked on the novel, she too developed toward radical political engagement. The move is manifest in the presence in the book of a second expatriate radical who spent a major portion of his life in England, namely Karl Marx—or rather, in the impact of both Marx and Engels since Summer Will Show ends with lines quoted from the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, which had been written by both men in German in early 1848 after being commissioned to do so by the Congress of the Communist League held in London in November, 1847.11 In the preface to the English edition of 1888, Engels says that “the fundamental proposition, which forms its

Summer Will Show  69 nucleus, belongs to Marx. That proposition is that in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange and the social organization necessarily following from it form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind…has been a history of class struggles” (4) Warner illustrates this process through the characterization of Sophia Willoughby, a young wife, who in the 1840 runs Blandamer House, a large country estate. One might anticipate a political novel with an estate setting in this decade to participate in the ethos of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) or Disraeli’s Coningsby or, The New Generation (1845). In the latter, Disraeli lionized the Young England movement of Tory aristocrats in search of a corporatist alternative to the conditions of modern industrial life. These young men modeled their proposed reforms, at least in imagination, on the institutions of the medieval monastic community and the feudal estate. In the Manifesto, Marx scornfully rejects both “Feudal Socialism” (28) and “Christian Socialism” (29) as “reactionary” (28) since they excluded the new class of the industrial proletariat from a lead role in the creation of a new order. Choosing to focus on a young woman, Warner presents her life in the country in terms of the classical political economy that provides the basis of Marx’s critique of modernity. Warner demonstrates the radical abstraction of Willoughby’s domestic existence, in which ownership, property, and management define her relation to all those around her, including her children. The sudden death of her children due to smallpox, however, ruptures this ego structure while underscoring her functional view of those around her. Early in the novel, Willoughby decides to resort to the use of a folk remedy in an effort to help her two young children, both of whom are having a difficult time recovering from whooping cough. To this end, she takes the children to the local lime-kiln in order to have the kilnman dangle them over the fumes of the furnace. Inhaling the fumes supposedly will cure the children. Willoughby may think that this practice, to which she herself had been subjected in childhood with apparent success, will at worst do no harm. Later, after her children die of smallpox, in distress she seeks an assignation with the kilnman in the hope that she may become pregnant again. He, however, rejects her approach. “Children do die hereabouts,” he remarks. “There’s the smallpox, and the typhus, and the cholera. There’s the low fever, and the quick consumption. And there’s starvation. Plenty of things for the children to die of” (81).12 When Sophia rebukes him for his coldness, he replies: “I’m like the gentry, then. Like the parsons, and the justices, and the lords and ladies. Like that proud besom down to Blandamer” (81). The name of the estate says it all: Blandamer, the bland demurral of responsibility for one’s neighbors, the act of not hearing the call of justice. Sophia also replies in political terms. In contrast to Ackland’s

70  Summer Will Show praise for the rebellious country folk of 1830, Sophia classes the kilnman’s words with “the insolence of the labouring classes” (83). Recalling “the Labourers’ Rising of 1830,” she repeats what she had learned as a child: “All her life long Sophia heard it said that the labouring classes were insolent, mutinous and violent. She had agree to this as to a matter of course, [that is, as a matter of nature, ] accepting the rightness of any legislation designed to keep them down, and in her own dealings with the poor at her gate going upon the assumption that even such apparently toothless animals as widows and Sunday School children should be given their pounds of tea or their buns through the bars” (82). In Part III of the novel, the most outspokenly political, Warner establishes the pedagogical basis of Sophia’s outlook: “She had been brought up (and brought up her own children) to consider the chiefest part of mankind as an inferior race, people to be addressed in a selected tone of voice and with a selected brand of language. Towards the extreme youth and age of the lower classes one adopted a certain geniality, to the rest one spoke with politeness. But to none of them did one display oneself as oneself; be it for approving pat or chastising blow one never, never removed one’s gloves” (234). The plot of the novel provides an economic historico-political basis for the inhumanity of estate psychology. As was so often the case in the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century rural economy, Blandamer House is not self-sustaining. Sophia’s father’s wealth is based upon income derived from a plantation that he owns in the West Indies, whose laborers until the mid-1830s were slaves (32). Warner activates this relation in the novel by introducing a character, Caspar Rathbone, the “illegitimate son” and “half-caste” offspring of Sophia’s half-uncle, Julius Rathbone, who manages the plantation. Early in the novel, Rathbone sends his son to England to be placed in a school where he can receive “a sound commercial education” (32). Sophia perceives Caspar upon his arrival to be a “dusky piece of romance” characterized by “extreme beauty and grace” (34). The boy at once attaches himself to her while she realizes that the school that she has scouted for him in remote and chilly Cornwall will not suit. A crisis occurs, however, when following a fight between her two children, her daughter, egged on by a servant (41), calls Caspar a “black” (41). Panicking, Willoughby hurries off to the school with the boy and deposits him there, impelled by an ideological force seemingly beyond reason and will that leaves her “helpless as a stone” (44). When, following the death of his cousins, Caspar returns to Blandamer on holiday at Christmas, he has been transformed: “He showed nothing to recommend him for her pug’s place now, his Sambo charm smudged out by a violent cold in his head, his fingers too heavy with chilblains to twitch more than a few jangling notes from his guitar, his only pleasure to sit by the fire sucking lozenges” (84). Even now, however, Sophia does not remove him from the school.

Summer Will Show  71 Just as carelessly, she leaves the estate behind in February, 1848, in order to conceive a new child with her estranged husband in Paris. Once arrived, however, she falls in love with Frederick’s cast off mistress, Minna Lemuel, a middle-aged Jewish Lithuanian refugee from a pogrom in the East. Through her affair with this woman, Willoughby is drawn into the street politics of the February and June insurrections. Stripped of economic privilege as a result of the scandalous betrayal of her social position, she becomes an active—if minor—participant in radical agitation at the same time that, given her inbred pride and skepticism, she is unable fully to endorse the theory, vision or politics of those whom she assists, including communists, the revolutionaries whom she respects most because they recognize the need for armed resistance against the state. When Caspar, having run away from school, turns up in Paris looking for Sophia, she repeats her act of abandonment. Minna takes to the boy, but a jealous triangle starts up. Caspar strongly resents Minna while Sophia is openly jealous of her lover’s attention to the boy. In order to get him out of their apartment, she quickly finds a school in Paris at which to place him. By now having lost control of her finances, however, she is forced to ask Frederick, despite his untrustworthiness, to handle the arrangements. Minna, fearing the worst, resists Sophia’s intention to get rid of Caspar. She suggests that at the very least the women keep him at hand by placing him in a day school (244). But Sophia insists. By now, the optimism and good feeling of the February revolution have given way to the gathering counterrevolution of June. The formerly apolitical Frederick, opportunistically become a Bonapartist, seizes Caspar’s fees for himself by placing the boy in the Gardes Mobiles, an armed troop hastily raised to take the lead in suppressing the anticipated insurrection of Parisian laborers.13 On the day when the outbreak occurs, Sophia is away from the apartment delivering subversive pamphlets. Returned at evening and desperate to find her lover, she at last locates Minna on a barricade. Fighting ensues, and the barricade is quickly overrun.“Like a swarm of bees the Gardes Mobiles came over, yelling and jeering. Caspar is one of these, Sophia thought. She was able to think now, there was nothing more she could do. With the certainty of a bad dream, there, when she looked up, was Caspar’s profile outlined against the smoky dusk, tilted, just as it had been on those summer evenings at Blandamer House, when he played his guitar, leaning against the balustrade. Lightly he leaped down within a hand’s breadth of her, crying Surrender” (310). Recognizing Sophia, in an instant Caspar’s faces takes on “a look of sheepish devotion.” But before he can speak, Minna sees him: “Why, it’s Caspar!” she cries. “It was Minna’s voice, warm, inveterately hospitable. He glanced round. With a howl of rage, he sprang forward, thrust with his bayonet, drove it into Minna’s breast. ‘Drab!’ He cried out, ‘Jewess! This is the end of you’” (310–311).14

72  Summer Will Show Sophia draws a pistol and shoots him in the mouth. It is her one act of revolutionary violence. At once, she is taken prisoner although later she is excused from a firing squad because gentlemen may not consent to execute “a lady” (317). In sending Caspar to England from the West Indies, his father could scarcely have envisaged this melodramatic climax. Placing his son in a commercial school, Rathbone thought that he was opening a practical and humane course for the boy, one that would enable him to earn a respectable and prosperous place in Creole society. By inserting Caspar into the action of the novel, however, Warner insists on the link between landed wealth in England and profits repatriated from the West Indies. Benevolence cannot remedy the violence inherent in the colonial plantation economy. Taking as her own the role of historical nemesis, Warner urges that such injustice inevitably demands reprisal.

III The double context of economic and political crisis in the early 1930s plus the simultaneous dramatic change in Warner and Ackland’s personal circumstances provides a more than adequate basis for an account of Summer Will Show. In fact, however, the point of origin of the novel occurred much earlier. In a note written in the 1960s, at a time when she was editing her letters for publication, Warner writes: It must have been in 1920 or 21…, that I said to a young man called Robert Firebrace that I had invented a person: an early Victorian young lady of means with a secret passion for pugilism; she attended prize-fights dressed as a man and kept a punching-ball under lock and key in her dressing-room. He asked what she looked like and I replied without hesitation: Smooth fair hair, tall, reserved, very ladylike. She’s called Sophia Willoughby. And there she was and there she stayed. I had no thought of doing anything with her.15 Warner speaks of inventing Willoughby, but there is something dreamlike about the moment as though intellectual invention could coincide with a waking dream or the experience of second sight. This sense is even more evident in Warner’s account of how Minna Lemuel came into existence. “A year or so later and equally out of the blue I saw Minna telling about the pogrom in a Paris drawing-room and Lamartine leaning against the doorway. And there she stayed” (39). It required the additional stimulus of Ackland’s presence and the exposure of both women to rural poverty—plus a trip to Paris—to initiate a narrative involving these two visitants. “I…was living at Frankfort Manor in Norfolk with Valentine when we went to Paris (1932, I think) and in the rue Mouffetard, outside a grocer’s shop, I found that I wanted to write a novel about 1848. And Sophie and Minna started up and rushed into it” (39–40). Something else happened in Paris as well. Warner and Ackland found

Summer Will Show  73 that some of the women whom they passed on the street acknowledged them, admiringly, as a couple.16 Public recognition of their relationship was a new—and un-English—experience for the pair. The experience underscored Ackland’s charisma and her highly performative female masculine style. This fantasy and its integration into Warner and Ackland’s conscious existence required in turn a series of experiments in a shared domestic life. These began after Warner purchased her first home, at Chaldon in Dorset, in June, 1930. Chaldon already had close personal associations for her through friends living in an artists’ colony there as well as Stephen Tomlin, a charismatic young sculptor to whom she became deeply attached before a crisis in the relationship ruptured the friendship in 1926. Bearing, significantly, the name of a spinster, Miss Green’s cottage was described by the surveyor at the time of purchase as “a small undesirable property situated in an out of the way place and with no attractions whatever.” Apparently not undesirable to Miss Green, however, nor to Warner. A place apart appealed. Moreover, Warner already had Ackland in mind as a fellow resident.17 Despite successes, financial and critical, as a poet and novelist since 1926, Warner had been depressed for more than a year. Since 1913, when she was 19, she had been involved in a secret affair with a married man 22 years her senior. Percy Buck was a leading force in the Tudor Church Music revival as well as a fellow instructor and friend of her father at Harrow. By 1929, Warner and Buck had worked together for more than a decade on a Carnegie U.K. Trust project, now complete, to gather, edit, and publish the first authoritative edition of Tudor ecclesiastical music. The relationship too was coming to an end although its inevitability was deferred by long trips abroad undertaken separately by Warner and Buck in 1929. During these troubled months, Ackland, who had met Warner through mutual friends in Chaldon, noticed Warner on the street one day in London looking “haunted and despairing.”18 Impulsively, she wrote to offer her a share in a cottage that she was renting in Chaldon. Warner declined, but when Ackland’s landlord learned of the offer, he terminated the lease on the ground that Ackland had attempted to sublet the property without permission. When Warner learned of the mishap, she felt under an obligation to the younger woman. On the day when a mutual friend suggested to Warner that she might be interested in purchasing Miss Green’s cottage, Warner asked Ackland whether she might be willing to live there as her steward. Ackland agreed and spent the rest of the summer preparing the house and garden prior to Warner’s arrival from London. During the interval, Ackland began having dreams about this woman whom she scarcely knew: “dreams of beautiful houses, declarations of love—sad on waking to have lost the dream—Sylvia’s ‘eager and loving look’—which she was sure she would never see on the real woman.”19 Meanwhile, Warner was thinking of offering the cottage as

74  Summer Will Show a gift to Ackland, who was unemployed and with little financial support from her family. Ackland refused the offer but continued to serve as steward after Warner arrived in late September. Then, on October 11, their relation shifted into a new key. Warner and Ackland had heard rumors that “the oppressed servant-girl at the vicarage, sent thither from a lunatic asylum, had tried twice that day to escape. It was not the first time, and the matter was notorious in the village, but this new development incensed the two women and they went immediately to call on the tenant of the house, a Miss Stevenson…. An acrimonious interview followed.” That night as each lay in her separate bedroom upstairs, an intermittent conversation began, and Sylvia overheard Valentine say “I sometimes think I am utterly unloved.” In her diary, Warner remarks: “The forsaken grave wail of her voice smote me, and had me up, and through the door, and at her bedside, begging her not to believe such a thing.” In the words of Warner’s biographer, Claire Harman, “in a moment, Valentine had gathered her up into bed, and they were lovers.”20 Warner was 36, Valentine 24. As Martha Vicinus points out in Intimate Friends, in the second half of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, pairs of women living together in the countryside who regarded their relationships as marriages often associated these ties with “rural bliss.”21 Best known among these women were the self-styled Ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. While Warner and Ackland were planning their move to Miss Green’s cottage, Sylvia remarked ambiguously that they would become “like the Ladies of Llangollen” (Harman, 98). Within the terms of modern sexology and psychoanalysis, the sexually expressive same-sex relationship that began that night was deemed natural albeit abnormal. Like their predecessors, over the next six years the pair contrived to develop their intimacy in a variety of homes in rural settings in Dorset and Norfolk. In this way, they simultaneously invoked modernity and tradition. Although some of their middle-class friends disapproved, the pair found the naturalness of their association to be ratified in the reticence or good will of some of their working-class neighbors. Those in Norfolk, who had known the upper middle-class Ackland since childhood, accepted her masculine style in dress and behavior as yet one more aspect of gentry life. In Dorset, affirmation came most significantly from an elderly, solitary woman, Granny Moxon, with “cropped white hair,” who had “befriended Valentine when she first came to Chaldon, recognising in the young woman not only a true love of the country and the skill to learn its ways, but a lonely, proud nature like her own…. It was Granny who taught Valentine to dig, lit the first fire at Miss Green’s and constantly reassured Valentine ‘Thee’m be all right.’” The death of Granny Moxon during the

Summer Will Show  75 pair’s first year at Miss Green’s and their dissatisfaction with the medical treatment that she had received during her illness drew Ackland into practical efforts to assist other neighbors with medical needs. This firsthand engagement began to meld with broader political concern as Ackland took note of the rise to power of the Nazi regime in Germany in 1933.22 In moving into Miss Green’s cottage, Warner and Ackland in effect joined the rural repatriation of a number of early twentieth-century High Bohemian women with Sapphic associations whose awareness of the immiseration of ordinary people was galvanized by country living. One is Radclyffe Hall, who spent summers with her first partner, Mabel Veronica Batten, at the White Cottage in Malvern before World War I. After becoming an outspoken lesbian activist in the late 1920s, Hall retired from London with another partner, Una Troubridge, to the town of Rye, overlooking Romney Marsh, where she was exposed to the slum conditions in which her nearby semi-rural neighbors lived. Although politically a conservative with quietist views, Hall was deeply impressed by experiencing the daily lives of the poor. This awareness registers in her final novel The Sixth Beatitude (1936), a powerful and moving study of lower-working-class life in a fictional town much like Rye. 23 Similarly, Virginia Woolf and her socialist husband, Leonard, lived in East Sussex at Monks House in Rodmell, a depressed agricultural village, from 1919 until the day of her death in 1941. Like most of Warner and Ackland’s homes in the 1930s, “there was no electricity, no indoor plumbing or drainage.” At Monks House, “when it rained heavily, a stream flowed down the eight steps from the garden into the kitchen, continued across the sloping floor, and exited through cracks at the front.”24 It was here that Woolf wrote her antifascist tract, Three Guineas (1938).

IV Sophia gradually comes to realize that the sense of embodied selfhood which she has discovered in Paris can be sustained only at the price of relinquishing the financial basis of her existence. This deprivation is at first forced upon her by husband and family, but she subsequently perceives its necessity. Becoming Minna’s lover and companion and engaging in the struggle of the urban underclass requires this stripping of Sophia’s customary self. To become woman, she must cease to be economic man. For Willoughby, however, becoming-woman is by no means a simple or altogether desirable matter. Her complex relationship to womanhood involves the novel in the history of gender and sexuality in yet another way. Warner couches this history both in terms of late Victorian sexology, which emphasizes the inversion of gender in female homosexuality, the discussion of female sexuality in psychoanalytic theory, and the imagination of male and female same-sex desire in Aestheticist  and

76  Summer Will Show Decadent writing, especially “Greek,” by both men and women. 25 In the novel, Warner presents Sophia’s changing knowledge within Enlightenment and nineteenth-century terms of freedom and liberty that combine political and aesthetic with sexual affirmation. But she also presents Willoughby as a paradigmatic example of what Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and 1930s refers to as the female ‘masculinity’ complex, namely a girl or woman’s wish to possess the physical and psychological characteristics associated with being a man. In his essay, “Female Sexuality” (1931; trans. 1932), Freud further contends that “‘this ‘masculinity complex’ in women can result in a manifest homosexual choice of object.”26 For him the moral basis of the complex is envy of male potency and entitlement. In view of the emphasis in the novel on the topic of female masculinity and Warner’s choice of a boy-woman as her life partner, it is surprising that she incorporates in the novel’s plot Freud’s moralizing take on female same-sex desire.27 In contrast, Hall in a number of works counters Freud on this point with her own concept of female virility. 28 Hall’s idea, based in part on a concept of the bodily ego that she shares with Freud, retains the notion of competition with males but expresses a different sense of relationality. 29 Warner’s use is motivated by her analysis of Willoughby’s situation as a talented young marriageable heiress in the early years of the Victorian period. Until she arrives in Paris following the failure of her marriage, Willoughby, although she fantasizes other women, is unable to imagine fashioning an emotional and sexual life together with one of them. Her resentment of male sexual privilege in and outside of marriage is related to this inability. Married off at an age when she was both sexually inexperienced and too young to have yet been able to demonstrate her ambition, aptitude, and capability to manage her father’s estate, it is precisely her situation as a young Victorian woman that establishes the preconditions for her radicalization in Paris in 1848. Once there, not only does she choose a female lover from the bohemian demimonde, she also alters her political outlook. As she says to her great-aunt at the end of the novel: “I have changed my ideas. I do not think as I did” (327). Partly in response to her mother’s role in pressuring her into an unsuitable marriage, Willoughby reacts strongly against conventional womanhood. Her marked disidentification from her assigned gender is evident in her ambivalence concerning the central function of women: namely, motherhood, of which Warner observes in another of her novels: “With the first child is born the mother, a new, a different being, who, even should she seek to do so, can never more re-enter the habitation of her maiden self…. At the child’s first cry she would vanish like a ghost at cock-crow.”30 Using a simile that likely refers to her experience of menarche, Sophia reflects that her children have been “like a wound in me that would never quite heal, that must perpetually be cleansed and dressed” (57). She dissociates herself from her mother. Likewise, after

Summer Will Show  77 her initial experience of sex with her husband, she determines that she is “frigid” (67), a word that refers more to 1920s’ injunctions of females to heterosexuality than to nineteenth-century understandings of female desire.31 Along with conscious emphasis on self-control and rational decision-making, Willoughby continually suppresses awareness of physical and emotional pain (36). The decline in her children’s health forces this psychic split to the fore as Willoughby fears for the loss of their (and through them of her own) future (36).32 Sophia, however, is also aware of a strong psychical countercurrent that, true to the historical setting of the novel, Warner sees as figured through an early Victorian appropriation of Byronic romance.33 On the way home from her first visit to Cornwall, Willoughby finds herself “queerly in love with the place” (33). She has caught a glimpse there of an as yet unrealized self: She could have been very happy at Trebennick. That air, so pure and earthy, absolved one back into animal, washed off all recollection of responsibilities; one waft of wind there would blow away the cares from one’s mind, the petticoats from one’s legs, demolish all the muffle of imposed personality loaded upon one by other people, leaving one free, swift, unburdened as a fox. At intervals during the summer Sophia had found herself betrayed by fancy into Cornwall, and leading there a wild romantic life, in which, unsexed and unpersoned, she rode, sat in inns, slept in a bracken bed among the rocks, bathed naked in swift-running brooks, knocked people down, outwitted shadowy enemies, poached one night with gipsies, in another went a keeper’s round with a gun under her arm. (34)34 Illustrating Willoughby’s split self, the fantasy runs parallel with everyday practicality: “Out of these rhapsodies she would fall as suddenly as she had fallen into them, and without a moment’s pause go on with what she was doing: a memorandum for the bailiff, a letter to the dressmaker, the paper boat her hands had been folding and fastening for [her daughter] Augusta to sail on the pond. In a space no longer than it takes to open one’s eyes she was back in her accustomed life, in a leap was transformed to daylight from darkness. And yet… she knew that by a moment’s flick of the mind she could levant into a personal darkness, an unknown aspect of Sophia as truly hers as one may call the mysterious sheltering darkness of one’s eyelid one’s own” (33–34). Willoughby displays spontaneous signs of female masculinity in her “maypole stature” (91), posture “straight as a ramrod” (115), “handsome” (91) good looks, physical strength, and athleticism (91, 115). She is also subject to erotic fantasies about other women: for one, Caspar’s mother, whom she projects as a “quadroon, passionate and servile” (37); for another, Mrs. Hervey, the conventionally pretty but inescapably

78  Summer Will Show petit-bourgeois young wife of the local apothecary, who breaks etiquette by presuming to visit Sophia during the children’s illness. Of Mrs. Hervey, Sophia speculates: “She might be in love with me” (51). Sophia’s leading fantasy-object, however, is Minna, whom Sophia has yet to meet: “a byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a rag-tag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels behind her; and ugly; and old, as old as Frederick or older” (29). Sophia experiences the discovery of the identity of her rival as a “sudden explosion” (32) that sets off trains of further bursts. When Frederick leaves Blandamer after the funeral of his children, Sophia, now alone, thinks: “The children, Frederick, Minna. Through this order her thought ran, and at Minna stayed, ignobly fascinated, ignobly curious, until the next explosion of bitterness hurled her into a rage that could not think at all…. Presently she began to dream of her” (74). In an implicit parallel, once Sophia arrives in Paris, she experiences the events of February and June as further explosions—of pent-up fury among other things. The point of both kinds is that their meaning is existential not moral, their outcomes incalculable. In both cases, what is asserted is the need for the passionate reaction against injustice to be uttered—in word and deed. As Heather Love points out, quoting the words of Minna on the night of the outbreak of the February revolution, such explosions promise neither virtue nor reward nor happiness.35 “One does not await a revolution as one awaits the grocer’s van, expecting to be handed packets of sugar and tapioca,” Minna tells Sophia. Recalling the image from her recitation of a river near her home that she saw covered with floating ice and the remains of Napoleon’s army in retreat from Moscow, she continues: “my river in spring flood brought dead bodies, a hand or foot dismembered, a clot of entrails. So will this flood, maybe. But for all that it is the spring flood” (121). In Warner’s original dream, Sophia Willoughby is a female boxer.36 Late in the novel, when Minna and Sophia are both broke, Minna shares the author’s fantasy as she laughingly suggests that Sophia might earn money by “appearing—under good auspices, you know—as a female pugilist” (225). Sophia takes aggressive action twice; once when she punches her estranged husband in the face after he has taken her jewels; second, when she shoots Caspar. Both acts may be just, but both also arise from envy. In context, Sophia resents being reminded that Minna had for a time been Frederick’s mistress (216). And, in Sophia’s “jealous” (243) regard, Caspar threatens her intimacy with Minna. In both cases, a love relationship is triangulated. In Between Men, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick empties out the concept of heterosexuality when she refigures it in terms of male homosocial desire, that is, in the rivalry of two men for a woman who, in Sedgwick’s schema, takes the

Summer Will Show  79 role of passive object.37 Warner alters the terms by substituting a contest between a male and a masculine woman. Sophia’s triangles involve two women and a male—in one case, Frederick, in another, Caspar. The rivalry between Frederick and Sophia is exacerbated by the fact that she now possesses his former mistress. Worse in Frederick’s eyes, the cast off “Jewess” prefers Sophia.38 Caspar, whose affection Sophia abuses, bayonets his successful female rival. These triangulations capture Sophia within the terms of the female masculinity complex.39 On the evening of her arrival in Paris, Sophia leaves her hotel, ostensibly to visit her husband unannounced. Finding him not at home, she proceeds to the apartment of her rival. It is the evening of one of Minna’s receptions. Tonight, however, Minna, moved perhaps by the noise of the gathering crowds in the streets, decides that she will relate not one of her trademark “Maerchen” but instead “a true story” (96) of the pogrom in which her parents were killed. Minna’s performance introduces an emphasis on rhetorical structures important in the remainder of the novel and also invoked by Marx in the Communist Manifesto (6): namely, truth-claims grounded in story-telling, fairy tales, and ghost stories. Sophia finds Minna’s performance mesmerizing. “Never in her life had she felt such curiosity or dreamed it possible. As though she had never opened her eyes before she stared at the averted head, the large eloquent hands, the thick milk-coffee coloured throat that housed the siren voice. Her curiosity went beyond speculation, a thing not of the brain but in the blood. It burned her like a furnace, with a steadfast compulsive heat that must presently catch Minna in its draught, hale her in, and devour her” (120). Afterwards, exhausted and unable to leave because of the tumult outside, Sophia falls asleep on Minna’s sofa. The next morning she awakens surprised to find where she is. She and Minna spend the day together there, and Sophia for the first time in her life pours out her own story. “It could not be of long duration, this new existence, another day even, in Minna’s company (yet for no consideration possible would she forego an hour of it), would madden her or kill her with excitement. No reason, no mortal frame, could long endure the ardour of this fantastic freedom from every inherited and practised restraint, nor the spur of that passionately sympathetic company. It was an air (however long and unknowingly she had panted for it) which must wear out breathing” (128–129). The affair between Minna and Sophia that follows introduces yet another genre, that of conversation.40 In a late seventeenth-century usage, conversation is defined as “an informal spoken interchange, a talk.” But in late Middle English, the word means “sexual intercourse or relations.”41 In this case, the former leads to the latter; and both are crucial in defining the relationship. Triangulation coexists within a developing dialogue. The emphasis on Minna as a performer shifts the presentation of female gender and sexuality. For Minna both are highly performative.

80  Summer Will Show At the beginning of Book III, she continues the story of her life but now in conversation with her new lover. She tells how she was rescued from subjection to a village priest by Corporal Lecoq, a former hairdresser, strolling actor, and soldier, who remained behind as a street performer following Napoleon’s defeat. After striking up an acquaintanceship with Minna under the eyes of the priest, the Frenchman one day discloses to her what it feels and looks like to be a woman: “Now we will fall to work,” he said, when we got to the sheepwashing trough. And on the grass he laid out soap, and a towel, and a comb, pomade in a china box, and a pair of curling-tongs…. And taking me by the scruff of the neck he pushed my head into the cool running water and lathered my hair, scolding at the lice, and the dirt, and the tangles. For a long while he soaped, and rinsed, and soaped and rinsed again, and I, forgetting my first fear, gave myself up to the pleasure of feeling myself so well handled, shivering with voluptuousness when he rubbed the nape of my neck, arching my head back against his strong hand. Then he rubbed it dry with a towel, combed it, and smeared on the pomade that smelled of violets. Last of all he kindled a little fire of sticks, heated the tongs, and curled my hair into ringlets. ‘There,’ said he, standing back to look at me well. ‘Those ringlets are called Anglaises. And now for the finishing touch.’ And out of his pocket he pulled an artificial rose, frayed and crumpled, and stuck it behind my ear. “When I looked in the sheep-trough, I did not know myself.” (193) Minna is intoxicated by being inducted into the recognition of her own female beauty. However, this new identification is inverted when she returns home and is seen by the house servant, Rosa. Accusing Minna of harlotry, Rosa immediately assaults her; but now, it is Minna’s turn to fight back, kicking and hitting. When the priest attempts to come to Rosa’s rescue, Minna, glaring at him, breaks into a speech from the classic French drama taught her by LeCoq. In the recitation, she discovers the power of performance that will later earn her money and celebrity as a story-teller: And as though it were a charm, an exorcism, I began to repeat a French tragedy speech which I had learned from Corporal Lecoq. I remembered the gestures he had taught me, the raising of the arm, the tossing back of the hair, the furling of the imaginary mantle, the hand laid on the heart. I swelled my voice to the clang of an organ, I made it cold with scorn, exact and small with menace as a dagger’s point. And while I spoke, my glance resting upon… [the passersby] as though they were a long way off, I saw them begin to shrink, and

Summer Will Show  81 draw back, and cross themselves…. Still reciting, still making the right gestures, rolling out my Alexandrines, dwelling terribly upon the caesuras, I began to step backward, haughtily, towards the door. And on the threshold I finished my tirade, and rolled my eyes over them once more. And so I walked off, free and unimpeded, to find Corporal LeCoq at the inn. (194) In this moment, performance crosses with performativity. Both are citational. And in both cases, “making the right gestures” is powerfully effective. Warner’s emphasis on the performative character of Minna’s engenderment and sexuality provides yet another way of subverting the naturalist assumptions that betray Sophia in Part I.42

V Lee Edelman refers to the ideological character of these assumptions with the phrase reproductive futurism, viz., the delusive attempt of the ego to secure its identity by projecting itself in genealogical terms through identification with children, particularly one’s own. “The figure of the Child enacts a logic of repetition that fixes identity through identification with the future of the social order.”43 The impossibility of sustaining this fantasy drives Sophia’s desperation at the opening of the novel. Without her children, time and work are empty. The very notion of a future is lost: “Everything would go on, and she with it, broken on the wheeling year. Next summer would come, and she would walk in the silent garden, her black dress trailing, her empty heart stuffed up like an old rat-hole with insignificant cares, her ambition for seemliness and prosperity driving her on to oversee the pruning of trees, the trimming of hedges, the tillage of her lands, the increase of her stock. Urged and directed by her will, everything would go on, though to no end. The balsams would bloom, and she be proud of them” (66). The epigraph of the novel puts in question the concept of the future as something malleable to human intention: “Winter will shake, Spring will try, /Summer will show if you live or die” (3). The authors of the Communist Manifesto stood in a similarly uncertain relationship to temporality despite their confidence that theirs was a scientific theory of history. Engels was forced to address this problem in the preface to the English edition of 1888. The 1848 text had offered specific analyses of European political parties and a specific table of “revolutionary measures…at the end of Section II” (5). Engels acknowledged that changing circumstances had quickly rendered these portions of the Manifesto “antiquated” (5). Marxist theory/praxis needed to internalize continual acknowledgments of the failure of attempts to map the road to socialism. In this respect, both Sophia at the end of the novel and the authors of the Manifesto face analogous aporia. For Marx and Engels, the events of

82  Summer Will Show the June Revolution verified the accuracy of Marxist theory by demonstrating, for the first time in history, the precipitation of a revolution of the proletariat against the combined forces of the bourgeoisie and the aristocratic remnant. As Marx acknowledges, however, as a result of the repression that followed the failure of the uprising, “the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbowroom, and to the position of extreme wing of the middle-class radicals” (1). The evolutionary path of socialism was neither unidirectional nor predictable. Nonetheless, by the late 1880s socialist principles had become widely accepted among workers’ political parties. In immediate context, Sophia faces even greater uncertainty. For the moment, she is without financial resources as she awaits a letter from the lawyer for the estate as to what financial provision, if any, Frederick will provide her. The fact that he has already closed Blandamer House, fired the servants, and sold its contents, however, suggests that he is likely to run through Sophia’s inheritance quickly. In the closing pages, her greataunt Léocadie moves to reconcile with her niece and offer her financial assistance. For the moment, Sophia declines; but it is reasonable to assume that Léocadie will help even if Sophia continues to insist upon her independence. What, however, is Sophia to do? Since the Parisian revolutionaries have never fully accepted her and to live with Léocadie would mean a loss of autonomy, it is unlikely that she will remain there. More likely is a return to England, to which many leftist refugees, Marx included, fled after the suppression of the Continental revolutions of 1848. In London, she may find others with similar political convictions. She may even become the woman who translates the Manifesto into English in 1850 for a radical journal.44 At the end, Willoughby, alone in what remains of her deceased lover’s apartment, picks up one of the packets that she has been circulating on behalf of the revolutionaries, opens it, and discovers a copy of the Communist Manifesto. In a moment literally hermeneutic, Willoughby reads the opening lines, which Warner quotes in the novel. In these lines, Marx and Engels dismiss conventional political ideology as a “nursery tale” that conjures communism as a bogeyman. Nonetheless, this “specter” haunts contemporary political calculations (6). They call upon members of the communist party to reject the account of themselves purveyed by their opponents and to write instead an account of themselves that will become a tale of emancipation. Sophia’s act in beginning to read the Communist Manifesto exemplifies one of the projects of the book that you are reading, namely, to explore how modern writers turned to Victorian texts for aid in attempting to understand the challenges that they themselves faced. To do so, twentieth-century writers were compelled to undertake the task of rereading and revaluation necessary if one were to be able to re-envisage the past and to reclaim the Victorian writers whom one needed so as to be able to make a place for oneself in one’s own present and future. For

Summer Will Show  83 Warner, this work meant reclaiming Marx and Engels as key Victorian originators of modern thought and action. Her novel in a sense begins with the London conference of 1847. Ackland and Warner’s revised Victorian canon recovers the cosmopolitan aspect of Victorian England, especially London, where radicals, republicans, socialists, and communists found refuge from repressive Continental regimes and sketched out programs of revolutionary change. In the twenty-first century, Robert Young has reminded readers of the major cultural impact made by émigré intellectuals in Victorian England.45 Moreover, in contrast to the shaping influence of refugees from political turmoil in Central Europe on English academic and intellectual culture in the mid-twentieth century, the nineteenth-century incursion was on the left not “White” as Perry Anderson has described its twentieth-century counterpart.46 Anderson has emphasized that Marx’s marginal status in England resulted in part from the fact that he had the misfortune to die early in the socialist decade of the 1880s. In contrast, Engels, who lived until 1895, took an active role as an advisor to socialist political and cultural organizations in England. As it was, socialist organizations in late Victorian England and Scotland included elements of Marx’s thought although none were able to sustain the conceptual tension between “its rationalistic drive and its ethical or visionary bent.”47 Even as early as in Paris in 1848, the divide is evident in the contrast between Sophia and Minna, one a pragmatist, the other a poet-anarchist. In the days before the June outbreak, Sophia becomes an agent in the struggle by undertaking to deliver scrap metal to a laundry where communist party workers are secretly converting it into bullets against the day when the Gardes Mobiles will be called upon to suppress the revolutionaries. The life and work of Marx, Engels, and other expatriates in London such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Peter Kropotkin helped to reshape both England and Europe although social injustices continued to persist in the United Kingdom. For Ackland and Warner, this effort of recovery and re-interpretation involved not only their intimacy and the two books that I have discussed but, in 1936 and later, significant work on behalf of the Republican cause in Spain. Living together in the countryside had had the effect of turning the pair into engaged cosmopolitans. Their ideas had changed.

Notes 1 Degeneration. 2 There the pair found what Raymond Williams speaks of as a “knowable community” (The Country and The City, 180). 3 Ackland, Country Conditions, 8. 4 Carver, Engels, 9. 5 Hobsbawm, Introduction, in Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 8.

84  Summer Will Show 6 Ibid., 38, 39. 7 Information in this paragraph is from Chapter 5, “Farmers.” 8 See Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing (1969.) 9 See Colley, Britons. 10 My italics. 11 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1—hereafter cited in notes and text as Manifesto. Marx briefly lived in France after the revolution of February, 1848. In 1849, he was expelled from Cologne. After briefly returning to Paris, with his family he sought refuge in London, where he spent the remainder of his life. 12 Warner, Summer Will Show. Except where otherwise noted, page references to the novel appear in the text. Critical studies of Warner’s novel include Gillian Beer, “Sylvia Townsend Warner”; Caserio, “Celibate Sisters-in-Revolution”; Montefiore, “Listening to Minna”; and Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 171–179. Of special interest are Castle, “Sylvia Townsend Warner,” and Foster, “Dream Made Flesh.” 13 Marx writes: To set one section of the proletariat against the other, …the Provisional Government formed twenty-four battalions of Mobile Guards, each composed of a thousand young men between fifteen and twenty. For the most part they belonged to the lumpenproletariat, which, in all towns, forms a mass quite distinct from the industrial proletariat. It is a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all sorts, living off the garbage of society, people without a definite trace, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu, varying according to the cultural level of their particular nation, never able to repudiate their lazzaroni character; during their youthful years—the age at which the Provisional Government recruited them—they are thoroughly tractable, capable of the greatest acts of heroism and the most exalted self-sacrifice as well as the lowest forms of banditry and the foulest corruption. (The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850, 52–53) 14 Madame Coton, the concierge at Minna’s apartment, had continually warned Caspar against “the Jewess.” 15 Warner, Letters, 39. Subsequent page references to this work and notes are referred to as Letters. A partial analogue exists between Willoughby and her older contemporary, Anne Lister (1791–1840), a landed gentlewoman whose erotic diary entries were decoded in the 1930s. Works by and about Lister are Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart, and Jill Liddington, Female Fortune and Nature’s Domain. 16 Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner, 125. See also Mulford, This Narrow Place. 17 Harman, 68, 97, 96. 18 Quoted in Harman, 90. 19 Ibid., 97. 20 Ibid., 99, 100. 21 Vicinus, 6. 22 Harman, 119, 135, 133–134. 23 Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall, a Life in the Writing, 237–263. Unless otherwise cited, references to Dellamora in the notes and text are to this work. 24 Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 206, 205. 25 Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Women”; Freud, “Female Sexuality,” Works, 21: 221–243. However, in preference to scientific categories, Warner chose to regard Ackland’s masculinity in terms of Greek desire, i.e., in terms of male

Summer Will Show  85 or Sapphic pederastic eros and in the Dionysian terms explored by the poetic duo of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote poetry under the name of Michael Field. Warner especially associates Sappho with the modernist poetic norm of “immediacy” (“Women as Writers,” 270). For Dionysus and male pederastic eros, see Warner’s short story, “The Salutation,” in the volume of the same title (cf. Harman, 95, 124). On Field and Dionysus, see Camille Cauti’s article, “Michael Field’s Pagan Catholicism.” On Greek desire, see Davis, Queer Beauty, 239–241, and Dellamora, “Greek Desire and Modern Sexualities.” 26 Freud, 21: 230. 27 I discuss below the place of the female masculinity complex in the narrative structure of the novel. 28 Dellamora, 74, 113. Competition did not occur only across lines of gender. Warner and Hall were both nominated for the Prix Femina in 1926, which Hall won for her novel, Adam’s Breed. (Harman 66) 29 Hall “contextualizes female virility not through the available Freudian models but in terms of a dynamic process that occurs within the phenomenology of engenderment” (Dellamora, 113). 30 Cited by Harman, 83. 31 Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies, 169–172. 32 See also Summer Will Show, 79. 33 Examples are Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). 34 Both style and content in the passage recall Woolf’s Orlando. 35 Love, Feeling Backward, 130–131. 36 Letters, 39. 37 See Sedgwick’s discussion of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, 161–179. 38 Here I imagine the word as Frederick’s; in the text, however, it is that of his aggrieved wife (29). 39 For a different reading of female homosocial triangulation in the novel, see Castle, “Sylvia Townsend Warner.” 40 Similarly, Ackland and Warner’s intimacy had been prompted by a conversation. 41 The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1: 502. 42 Representations of female sexuality in the 1920s and early 1930s tend to emphasize it as both innate and performative. Both emphases occur within sexology and psychoanalysis as well as in the work of artists such as Hall and Colette, the Parisian writer and cabaret artist, whom Warner much admired. Dellamora discusses these emphases in the work of both Hall and Colette in Radclyffe Hall. See also Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. Warner praises Colette as a modernist in her essay, “Women as Writers,” 270, 272. 43 Edelman, No Future, 25. 4 4 The actual translator was Miss Helen Macfarlane (Manifesto, 1). 45 Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 237–238. 46 Anderson, “Components of the National Culture,” 229–234. 47 Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism, 272.

Bibliography Ackland, Valentine. Country Conditions. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936. Anderson, Perry. “Components of the National Culture.” In Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn. Baltimore, MD: New Left Review, 1969. Pp. 214–284.

86  Summer Will Show Beer, Gillian. “Sylvia Townsend Warner: ‘The Centrifugal Kick.’” In Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics, and History, ed. Marjoula Joannou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1999. Pp. 76–86. Carver, Terrell. Engels. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981. Caserio, Robert L. “Celibate Sisters-in-Revolution: Towards Reading Sylvia Townsend Warner.” In Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Routledge, 1990. Pp. 254–274. Castle, Terry. “Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction.” Textual Practice, 4.2 (1990): 213–235. Cauti, Camille. “Michael Field’s Pagan Catholicism.” In Michael Field and Their World, ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2007. Pp. 181–189. Colette. The Pure and the Impure. Trans. Herma Briffault and introd. Judith Thurman. New York: New York Review Books, 2000. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1992. Davis, Whitney. Greek Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010. Dellamora, Richard. “Greek Desire and Modern Sexualities.” In Imagination and LOGOS: Essays on C. P. Cavafy, ed. Pangiotis Roilos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2010. Pp. 121–142. ———. Radclyffe Hall, A Life in the Writing. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. Ellis, Havelock. “Sexual Inversion in Women.” In Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Volume 2. Part One: Sexual Selection in Man; Part Two. Sexual Inversion. 1910. Reprint. New York: Random House, 1936. Pp. 195–263. Engels, Frederick. The Condition of the Working Class in England from Personal Observation and Authentic Sources. Introd. Eric Howbsbawm. London: Granada, 1969. Foster, Thomas. “‘Dream Made Flesh’: Sexual Difference and Narratives of Revolution in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show.” Modern Fiction Studies, 41.3–4 (1995): 531–562. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1971–1974. Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. New York: Free Press, 2006. Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. London: Minerva, 1989. Hobsbawm, E. J., and George Rudé. Captain Swing. New York: Norton, 1975. Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880– 1930. London: Pandora, 1985. Liddington, Jill. Female Fortune: Land, Gender, and Authority: The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833–1836. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998.

Summer Will Show  87 ———. Nature’s Domain: Anne Lister and the Landscape of Desire. Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Pennine Press, 2003. Lister, Anne. I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, ed. Helena Whitbread. London: Virago, 1988. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007. Marx, Karl. The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850. In Political Writings. Volume 2. Surveys from Exile, ed. and introd. David Fernbach. New York: Vintage, 1974. Pp. 35–142. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959. Pp. 1–41. Montefiore, Janet. “Listening to Minna: Realism, Feminism and the Politics of Reading.” Paragraph, 14 (1991): 197–216. Mulford, Wendy. This Narrow Place, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930–1951. London: Pandora, 1988. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Lesley Brown. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Trans. From the second German edition. Introd. George L. Mosse. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985. Singer, Peter. Marx. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004. Wachman, Gay Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2001. Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Letters, ed. William Maxwell. New York: Viking Press, 1983. ———. The Salutation. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. ———. Summer Will Show. Introd. Claire Harman. New York: New York Review Books, 2009. ———. “Women as Writers.” In Collected Poems, ed. Claire Harman. New York: Viking, 1982. Pp. 265–274. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando, a Biography. London: Grafton Books, 1985. Young, Robert J. C. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008.

4 Pathological Legacies Patriarchy in Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes

The following two chapters deal with what I refer to as the archive of Virginia Woolf’s principal writing of the 1930s, all of which is related to the novel The Years (1937). Included are The Pargiters, the first draft of the novel, published posthumously in 1977; other drafts, published and unpublished; the anti-fascist tract, Three Guineas (1938); and the biography of Roger Fry (1940). Also pertinent is A Sketch of the Past, a posthumous memoir left incomplete at the time of Woolf’s death in 1941. The Years departs from the intensive exploration of individual psychological interiority that gives form to the three modernist classics that Woolf published between 1925 and 1931. As I argue in Chapter 5, however, in The Years she chose instead to write in the popular genres of the social chronicle and the genealogical novel. However, the secular temporality that characterizes the former posed continuing challenges for her in designing and editing the text. Chris Baldick argues that the social chronicle novel represents human behavior as a sequence of effects of causes, usually biological, and best understood in Darwinian or socio-economic terms or a combination of the two.1 In this respect, the genre resembles French and English naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth century as well as Edwardian novels such as John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906). 2 In the course of Galsworthy’s novel, the action narrows to the pursuit of the members of a possibly adulterous couple: Irene Forsyte, a young wife disabused following a marriage of convenience, and Philip Bosinney, the promising young architect with whom she falls in love. The Years is absent the explicit Darwinist trajectory of Galsworthy’s novel, its melodramatic plot, and detailed descriptions of setting and individual character. These choices reflect the influence on Woolf of the axioms of early twentieth-century philosophy at Cambridge and in Bloomsbury as adapted by Roger Fry in his aesthetics of modernist painting. Cambridge epistemology was the radical critique of unselfconscious thought undertaken by young men such as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and, soon, Ludwig Wittgenstein. 3 Inspired by discoveries in contemporary physics, these writers rejected common-sense realism and conventional accounts of cause-effect

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  89 relations in favor of a view of physical Reality as invisible, dynamic, and ­indeterminate.4 For Fry and Russell, the world inaccessible to sensory experience can nonetheless be ascertained through formal logic and mathematical symbolization. Cambridge epistemology rejects both objectivity and subjectivity as illusory. In Woolfian aesthetics, reality in time can be grasped only in continually shifting pattern-making, moments of which are figured within The Years and explicitly theorized in A Sketch.5 As Ann Banfield writes, quoting The Years: “Something like a directly apprehended logical form, ‘a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible,’ also ‘fixes and makes permanent,’ as Woolf says of reality itself, and thus prevents ‘whatever it touches,’ like a photographic image, from otherwise fading in the light of time.”6 In A Sketch of the Past, Woolf privileges what she calls “moments of being”—i.e., individual apprehensions of time relieved of the burden of everyday routine, boredom, and ennui. Contrary to Russell, however, Woolfian time is plural; it includes moments of qualitative break, a view also taken by Walter Benjamin in his concept of the now and, later, in the theory of event as discussed by Alain Badiou and others.7 Psychoanalysis, another paradigmatically modernist form of thought, also privileges particular moments, usually of infantile bliss or trauma.8 But the narratives of psychoanalysis look back to nineteenth-century forms of story-telling. Freud’s stories are plot-driven and determined. And the significance of the secret within psychoanalytic theory dramatically restructures the lives of individuals and social groups. Woolf favors the concept of time as rupture in her biography of Fry, but in the autobiographical sections of her memoir she writes within the terms of psychoanalytic fictions.9 By curating important English exhibitions of European modernist painting, Fry instigated a transformative break with the Victorian past. Woolf asserts that the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which he organized at the Grafton Gallery in London in late 1910, marked a decisive break in cultural and social history. On one side were the Victorians; on the other emerged the moderns. This view is at odds with the time of memoir. The “I” who narrates a memoir in the present can be distinguished but not severed from the “I” (or “I”s) who is or are its past object recalled in memory. In A Sketch and other personal writing, moreover, Woolf characteristically shows herself to be an imaginative participant in the lives of Victorian women, especially those in her lineage. In contrast, when she traces male genealogy, in particular in the sketch of her father, Lesie Stephen, she separates herself and her time from Victorian patriarchy.10 But it is precisely patriarchal entitlement that ruptures her existence as a young child with life-long consequences. Characterizing her father as a type, Woolf draws from the implicitly psychoanalytic analyses that her friend, Lytton Strachey, provided in the highly influential set of biographical sketches entitled Eminent

90  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes Victorians (1918). In the most significant of these, “The End of General Gordon,” Strachey extends the analysis of Victorian masculinity so as to include a diagnostic of late Victorian imperial ideology and its effects. Gordon’s obsessively literal version of Christianity establishes him as hopelessly outdated, but the psychosis that led to his destruction and that of those under his command is grounded in the same sense of male privilege that Woolf delineates in her sketch of her father. In combination with modern technology, imperial ideology and bourgeois patriarchy established a framework within which modern mass warfare and the self-destruction of European civilization in World War I became both possible and—in Woolf and Strachey’s view—inevitable. By the end of World War I, the world and its conditions of possibility had been permanently transformed.11 Later in this chapter, I suggest that the political and diplomatic work of Woolf’s husband Leonard and friend John Maynard Keynes may properly be understood in relation to the concept of “the event,” i.e., to moments in which interventions become possible that resist being understood in terms of historical contextualization.12 Can the PostImpressionist Exhibitions properly be considered as examples of what Benjamin refers to as “time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]”? Benjamin regards the present moment perceived in this sense as a “seed” full of potential for the transformation of history.13 May Leonard Woolf and Keynes’s later political interventions, conditioned as they are by the effects of two World Wars, be seen as growing from a crucial pre-War moment?14 The modernist movement provides the focal point of Woolf’s biography of Fry, who curated the First and Second Post-Impressionist Exhibitions and in 1913 founded the Omega workshops, an experiment in modern commercial and residential design that drew on the efforts of highly talented young artists. Paradoxically, however, she embeds her account of the advent of English modernism in a biography that conforms to outmoded conventions of Victorian biography. In effect, she writes the history of modernism in the form of what Nietzsche called “monumental history,” namely the exemplary lives of great men.15 In A Sketch, however, she conducts a self-conscious critique of these conventions. Woolf’s account of Fry’s introduction of Londoners to “modern French art” closely follows his own account, provided in “Retrospect,” an essay that appears in his best-known work, Vision and Design (1920).16 Envisaged as part of a project of post-War democratic pedagogy, the book became an instant primer in modernist attitudes in art.17 The contest that Fry and Woolf record between established taste in England and Fry’s band of wild artists (Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse) signifies both in its immediate context in 1910 and in confirming a new set of attitudes among younger readers shortly after the War.

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  91 Fry’s close ties with young artists permitted Woolf to expand the scope of the study so that it becomes to a degree a biographical account of young Bloomsbury, including Woolf’s older sister, Vanessa.18 “There was the new friendship with Vanessa Bell, who, as a painter belonging to the younger generation, had all the ardour of the young for the new movements and the new pictures and urged him away from the past and on to the future.”19 Writing herself into the movement as well, Woolf registers the transformation of her sensibility in fall, 1910. Weaving personal and historical references into the text, she recalls that the works to be exhibited were “bold, bright, impudent almost, in contrast with the Watts portrait of a beautiful Victorian lady that hung on the wall behind them.”20 Likewise, Fry showed his friends printed Manchester textiles manufactured for export to Africa that “made the chintz curtains” of the Grafton Gallery “look faded and old-fashioned like the Watts portrait” (152). In A Sketch, Woolf represents Victorian actualities through modernist modes of representation, both painterly and psychoanalytic. Her conversion to aesthetic modernism in 1910 marks a key point of division between herself and the privileged Victorian past in which her parents and their families moved. Despite her efforts otherwise, however, Woolf’s study of Fry is in the monumentalizing spirit that characterizes Victorian official biography, including the biographies of Watts and Alfred Lord Tennyson, both of whom she mentions in A Sketch.21 In this sense, Roger Fry is both historicized and historicizing. Using the genre to cement Fry’s eminent place in English modernism, Woolf argues that the prestige enjoyed by Cézanne in England in the late 1930s confirms the prophetic character of Fry’s role in promoting the painter’s work a generation earlier (159). Notwithstanding, as a modern, Woolf found conforming to the conventions of Victorian biographical form (the emphasis on fact, the observance of chronology, and the extensive citation of personal and professional correspondence)—to be time-consuming, tedious, and self-defeating. Indeed, Woolf says that it was because she was “sick of writing Roger’s life” that she began to write A Sketch. 22 Woolf was immersed in the world of Victorian biography as a result of her father Sir Leslie Stephen’s role as editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Indeed, one of her earliest publications is a child’s memoir of her father, included in F. W. Maitland’s valedictory biography of Stephen in 1906. 23 In her periodical work, Woolf frequently produced well received memoirs and biographical essays about Victorian notables, one of the most characteristic of which is her obituary notice of Lytton Strachey’s mother, who suffered blindness late in life. In “Lady Strachey” (1928), Woolf enrolls the woman in Victorian female genealogy. But she does so in a double way, giving the feminine past its due while gently, condescendingly, ushering it offstage: “Last summer, though too weak to walk any more, she sat on her balcony and showered

92  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes down upon the faces that she could not see a vast maternal benediction. It was as if the Victorian age in its ripeness, its width, with all its memories and achievements behind it were bestowing its blessing. And we should be blind indeed if we did not wave back to her a salute full of homage and affection.”24 In resistance to Woolf’s own implication in the work of Victorian biography, A Sketch provided her with an uncensored opportunity to express her dissatisfactions with “the three or four hundred pages of compromise, evasion, understatement, overstatement, irrelevance and downright falsehood which we call biography.”25 Woolf had hoped to offer a portrait of Fry in the Post-Impressionist manner. Succumbing instead to the rules of Victorian decorum, in her treatment she curbed the sexual candor that was a cardinal tenet of the Bloomsbury aesthetic. 26 Two months after Fry’s death, Vanessa Bell and Margery Fry, Roger’s elderly spinster sister, paid Woolf a crucial visit. For different reasons, both women wanted Woolf to write the biography. Vanessa wanted her affair with Fry to be made part of the public record. She also wanted “the truth” to be told about his longterm relationship with Helen Anrep, begun after Fry’s wife had been permanently institutionalized on account of mental illness. 27 “I hope,” Vanessa wrote, “you won’t mind making us all blush…. The only important thing is to tell the truth, for the sake of the younger generation.”28 Woolf herself was uncertain. As she had written to her sister earlier: “How am I to write this book? What am I to say about you?”29 For their part, Margery and her sisters demanded that Fry’s extramarital affairs and his tie to Anrep be suppressed. Woolf later reported to her sister: Margery “disapproves of any truth told about the Frys…. She… [is] walled still in the 19th century; shouting like a lost sheep in a gale.”30 Re Anrep, Woolf compromised with a brief but explicit acknowledgment that Fry’s life with her had been a marriage in all but name.31 On another matter, however, Woolf betrayed her principles. In an unpublished memoir, Fry had recorded the brutal floggings perpetrated by the headmaster of Sunninghill House, his first boarding school. As head boy, Fry was forced to hold down the headmaster’s victims during the beatings. After taking part in one of these sessions, Fry was shocked one night to find himself sexually aroused in bed by what he had witnessed. Concerned lest Margery be offended, Woolf decided to pass over the moment by inserting an ellipsis in Fry’s account: “My reaction to all this was morbid. I do not know what complications and repressions lay behind it but their connection with sex was suddenly revealed to me one day when I went back to my room after assisting at an execution… [sic] all ideas of sex had been deeply repressed in me in my unremembered past.”32 Woolf intended to provide a portrait of Fry by bringing together his “2 lives...: “emotion & art.”33 Victorian biography had been unable to

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  93 convey the former because of the demands made by subjects’ widows and friends: “Cover up; omit,” Woolf imagines them as saying.34 Her deference to Fry’s sisters, however, made it impossible for her to be candid about the place that passionate attachments to women had held in Fry’s life and art. At the same time, his insistence in his written work that the emotion that matters in art is specifically aesthetic rather than personal or libidinal, though a commonplace of modernist art criticism, operated so as to silence the topic as it affected his work.35 For Woolf, biography itself was a second-order genre, not only because of its role as handmaid to fact but also because it demanded a presentation of its subject that contradicted modernist ontology. In addition to moments of being and of mundaneity or unbeing, Woolf recognized the abyssal possibilities of selfhood that emerged for Fry at the moment when he was confronted by his wife’s mental collapse. Ironically, Woolf places this moment of eclipse at the end of Chapter 6, immediately prior to her presentation of Fry’s triumphal achievement as organizer of the 1910 exhibition. Evoking the sense of loss of self that Fry experienced after his wife was institutionalized, Woolf writes: His emotions were broken and contradictory. He did not attempt to take up any attitude. He had to find his way, to piece things together, as best he could…. He had no creed. The old phrases meant nothing to him. He dreaded most, he said, “shutting myself up in the imprisonment of egotism.” The understanding of life, like the understanding of art, must be attempted by following its lead according to his own discovery of the pattern. He laid himself open to all experience with a certain recklessness, because so many of the things that men care for, as he said later, were now meaningless. The centre which would have given them meaning was gone…. At the back of all that he accepted and rejected after his wife left him lay the fact of that experience—he had suffered and was to go on suffering, something that was, he said, “far worse than death.” (147–148)36 In A Sketch, Woolf began to work out a meta-theory of biography and the self. Victorian biography was supposed to demonstrate the character of its subject in action—even if that action was mainly confined to painting or writing poetry.37 Woolf’s rejection of this axiom constitutes her most damning criticism of the genre. Writing within the genre of memoir enabled her to write the self in ways that negate the “I” of Victorian biography. The I who speaks in A Sketch has no character and performs no actions. Chronology is observed from time to time, but there is no narrative of developing selfhood. Instead, Woolf proceeds by offering a series of sketches and portraits of others, mainly members of her family, although she is conspicuously silent concerning Vanessa despite the fact

94  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes that she held her sister responsible for having persuaded her to undertake both Roger Fry and A Sketch.38 Woolf directly addresses the double time of memoir by interrupting her account of the past with passages describing the disruptive conditions under which she wrote early in World War II. Each of these interruptions operates as what both she and Benjamin describe as a “shock.” Benjamin associated shock both with the experience of montage in Surrealist art and with the fragmented way in which Baudelaire depicts details of modern urban life in his poetry and criticism. For both Benjamin and Baudelaire, “the experience of shock is the hallmark of metropolitan experience and the definitive signature of modernity itself…. The modern urbanite is subject to a surfeit of stimuli and sensations which threaten to overload and overwhelm the human consciousness.”39 Woolf’s focus is different, emphasizing incursions of violence into normalcy with particular attention to the physiological effects of shock. In A Sketch, she describes moments of being that are characterized not by a unification of consciousness but by shock effects, for example, an experience that occurred at an early age while she and her brother Thoby were fighting, and another, also from childhood, involving the suicide of a neighbor. We were waiting at dinner one night, when somehow I overheard my father or my mother say that Mr Valpy had killed himself. The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit night—in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed. (71)40 Woolf also describes shock in Three Guineas (1938), written in tandem with Roger Fry and shortly before she began writing A Sketch. Here the emphasis is on effects on the nervous system as Woolf describes atrocity photographs released by the Spanish government for propaganda purposes during the Spanish Civil War. In addition to images of body parts and corpses of children is another of the bombed out “section of a house”: A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting-room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid air. These photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  95 the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes places within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are the same, and they are violent.41 Woolf structures each new section of A Sketch with the date and other information connected with the moment of writing, usually a shock related to the early stages of World War II. She notes the non-selfcoincidence of the “I” by observing the fact that the I which is the object of memoir-writing is different from the I who writes.42 In A Sketch, she puts to good use psychoanalytic aspects of Strachey’s approach in Eminent Victorians. But she also develops her own, in particular in passages of self-analysis in which she demonstrates that the “I” of memoir and biography is not only a register of sensations but also a point of intersection of numerous patterns of psychical relationship. The resulting absence of self-coherence in the subject renders both autobiography and narrative history at times impossible projects. It would be incorrect to say that the three recollections with which Woolf begins A Sketch occur to an “I.” Rather, in the mode of classic modernist fiction, they record sensations.43 Woolf attempts to convey the sensorium at a moment in time—when, for example, Virginia is sitting in her mother’s lap on a train or omnibus on the way to or from their summer home at St. Ives in Cornwall. The recorded moment, however, condenses many such moments into a single image of sight, sound, and touch. The second recollection, or “impression” (65) as she calls it, is of the sounds that she used to hear while in bed at night at St. Ives. These passages attempt to convey a sense of consciousness as a unified field of impressions derived from all five senses (66). Later in the memoir, she refers to such experiences as “moments of being” in contrast to states of shock such as those described above as well as moments of “non-being” (70), i.e., of conventional or habitual experience, which tend to be lost to memory. Woolf believed that consciousness begins in sensation, particularly the sensation of color.44 This “primeval” responsiveness, however, is quickly modified in the development of human self-consciousness, which includes the mastery of language.45 Accordingly, Woolf demonstrates her ability as a writer to create painterly effects:” If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture that was globular; semi-transparent….I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard; sounds would come through this petal or leaf—sounds indistinguishable from sights” (67).46

96  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes This unified field or moment of being circumscribes individual consciousness before it is able to objectify itself as an I. Woolf resorts to an image in order to try to recover the sense: “the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow” (65). The figure of speech is aesthetic. But it is also psychoanalytic just as Woolf’s concept of memory correlates with Freud’s image of the work of anamnesis in analysis as one of excavation. The psychoanalytic referent is also Kleinian.47 Reconstructing a moment in the past, Woolf projects Virginia into a state of pre-Oedipal consciousness within the womb of her mother. The metaphorical union of mother and child is important since Woolf’s relation with her mother is the most significant as well as the most ambivalent one recorded in A Sketch. In its portrayal of Woolf’s mother, A Sketch articulates Woolf’s conviction that her mother had betrayed her, an offense which resulted in the most significant violation of selfhood at the hands of another that Woolf was to experience. Woolf writes that in these early memories “I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation, I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture” (67). She next moves on to a series of memories that provide a primal sense of the I. Again, because this “I” will not be unitary, it offers a subject incapable of conventional autobiography. Nonetheless, its development will be crucial to Woolf’s account of the linkage between early childhood experience and history. In another condensed image, she remembers her fascination when looking at herself in “a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House” (67). Again, the memory is a composite that condenses many such instances. At this point, Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage comes to mind, namely, the view that it is when looking at oneself (for Lacan, this self is male) in a mirror that the infant first becomes aware of itself as an objectified body-image that has an existence distinctly apart from that of the now for the first time recognized “I” that observes it.48 Woolf’s mirror stage, however, is radically different from Lacan’s. It is here that the remarkably complex weaving and reweaving of relations within the triad of the nuclear family that Klein discusses in her essay, “Love, Guilt and Reparation” (1937), is highly pertinent.49 Woolf adds to this domestic scene the additional dimension of historical time in the shape of a genealogy that is both male and female. This doubly gendered genealogy helps explain cross-gendered expression and self-awareness in her early experience of selfhood. To this vertical temporal dimension, Woolf adds a further horizontal dimension since she associates early experiences of gendered embodiment with her relationship to her sister Vanessa. The affects that accompanied Woolf’s “habit of looking at my face in the glass” were those of shame and guilt, which she explains by invoking the “tomboy code” that she shared with her sister. “Vanessa and I were both what was called tomboys; that is, we

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  97 played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on. Perhaps therefore to have been found looking in the glass would have been against our tomboy code.” The pairing of Virginia with Vanessa registers a sense of mixed gender complemented by a mutual desire for oneself and one’s sister. To use Lacan’s term, each had become “the counterpart” (5) of the other. Woolf next invokes genealogy to help explain the affects noted above. In a sentence that simultaneously avows and disavows phallic pleasure, she associates the reaction with “my grandfather—Sir James [Stephen], who once smoked a cigar, liked it, and so threw away his cigar and never smoked another.” The anecdote suggests both an experience of male homoerotic desire and a recoil into what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick refers to as male homosexual panic, i.e., panic prompted by the conscious sensation of male same-sex desire. Sir James belonged to a militant sect “motivated by evangelical or Quaker ideals of ‘moral purpose.’”50 Physical pleasure, particularly pleasure taken in the self, was to be negated. Woolf further associates the discomfort that she feels in seeing her own attractiveness with an “opposite instinct inherited” from her father: “My father was spartan, ascetic, puritanical.” Nonetheless, a counterforce exists, “my natural love for beauty,” which she inscribes within her awareness of a genealogy of female beauty—her sister’s but most of all her mother Julia’s. Of beauty, Klein has suggested that “any source of joy, beauty and enrichment (whether internal or external) is, in the unconscious mind, felt to be the mother’s loving and giving breast and the father’s creative penis, which in phantasy possesses similar qualities, ultimately, the two kind and generous parents” (336). Sublating erotic aspects of a narcissistic interest in her body-image, young Woolf “disconnected” them from her “body.” Instead, she found beauty in nature, a displacement mentioned by Klein: “the relation to nature which arouses such strong feelings of love, appreciation, admiration and devotion, has much in common with the relation to one’s mother, as has long been recognized by poets. The manifold gifts of nature are equated with whatever we have received in the early days from our mother” (336). 51 The passage ends with personal and social history abruptly shifted to another register as Woolf associates the memory of looking in the glass with the experience of sexual interference from her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this.52 There was a slab outside the dining room for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower.

98  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it. (68–69) In relating this memory, Woolf moves in a new direction. The erotic sense of one’s own body is shifted from the sort of positive sublation hypothesized by Klein to the young girl’s mental and psychical dissociation from what Gerald is doing. The result might be a long-lasting revulsion against not only her step-brother but against male sexual interest more generally; under the circumstances, Woolf might well identify the latter with psychical and physical threat. She might also feel a strong and even more recalcitrant aggressivity against her mother. As Gerald’s mother, Julia Stephen was a surprising, hence confusing albeit indirect source of the unwanted touch that Woolf had experienced. Julia was culpable, moreover, insofar as preferential treatment of her sons by her first marriage encouraged the sense of entitlement acted out upon their stepsister’s body.53 The passage quoted above, the most startling revelation in A Sketch, does recompense for the suppression of sexual material in the biography of Fry while indicating a will to speak and to be healed even though it is not known whether Woolf would have retained the passage when editing A Sketch for publication.54 In any case, as we have it, Woolf’s revelation operates in the first instance as an act of self-therapy. As importantly, it is an action in the reclamation of women’s history from the immemorial record of male violence that Woolf registers in Three Guineas. Woolf’s discussion is directed toward this public end: “This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25 of January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past” (69).55 From this conclusion, Woolf returns to the point with which she begins A Sketch, namely, the impossibility of identifying the biographical subject: “People write what they call ‘lives’ of other people, that is, they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown” (69). Woolf ends this section of the memoir with “a dream.” “It may refer to the incident of the looking-glass,” she suggests; it may also refer to the incident that she places between the mirror passage and the dream. Likely, it refers to both: “I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if it happened. Was I looking in the glass one day when something in the background moved, and

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  99 seemed to me alive? I cannot be sure. But I have always remembered the other face in the glass, whether it was a dream or a fact, and that it frightened me ” (69). Once again, the text registers a doubled self, conforming at the surface of the mirror to the feminine injunction to (and desire for) female beauty while simultaneously indexing the inward rage provoked by embodied knowledge of the domestic and social history in which female beauty signifies. Second, the composite figure of beauty and the beast refers both to Gerald’s action and to male sexual assault against women more generally.56 In his writing about Post-Impressionism, Fry frequently refers to it as a form of neo-primitivism.57 Likewise Post-Impressionist painting by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell in the immediate wake of the PostImpressionist Exhibitions emphasizes primitive sources in post- Classical and pre-Renaissance art such as Byzantine mosaics.58 In her essay on the painter Walter Sickert, Woolf emphasizes the Darwinian theory of the recapitulation of the stages of evolution within the development of the individual human being. “Were we once insects like that, … all eye? Do we still preserve the capacity for drinking, eating, indeed becoming colour furled up in us, waiting proper conditions to develop? For as the rocks hide fossils, so we hide tigers, baboons, and perhaps insects, under our coats and hats. On first entering a picture gallery, whose stillness, warmth and seclusion from the perils of the street reproduce the conditions of the primeval forest, it often seems as if we reverted to the insect stage of our long life.”59 The dream image of Woolf’s animal counterpart in the passage cited above emphasizes, however, the resurgence not so much of primitive but of savage material.60 As the memoir continues, this word gains salience both with reference to Woolf’s “tyrant father” (116) and to what, late in A Sketch, she repeatedly refers to as the “machine” of Victorian society.61 In contrast to the color of her early memories, Woolf pictures her sketch of her father as monochrome, a “steel engraving…, with an infinity of precise clear lines” (109). This image, moreover, is social not personal. It is the portrait of “a representative man” (111) of the midVictorian period, a “typical Cambridge intellectual” (110), a group about whom Woolf was well informed and for which she felt lifelong “respect” (109). Nonetheless, in the opening chapter of Three Guineas, she had recently deplored “the psychology of educated men’s sons” while providing a radical critique of the culture, ideology, wealth, and influence of Oxford, Cambridge, and the leading public schools.62 In their place, she recommended the founding of new colleges, “adventurous” and “experimental” institutions motivated by a democratic, highly individualized ideal of educational reform.63 Woolf loved her father and found many of his traits charming; moreover, her educational ideal was founded on the freedom of his library which he had granted her as an adolescent, a rare opportunity for a young woman at the time. Nonetheless, she

100  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes provides an ideological analysis of his personality that quickly divides what might at first glance appear to be a unified public persona. In turn, Leslie Stephen’s divided self mirrors the doubleness of what Woolf calls her “ambivalent feeling” (111) concerning him. Leslie Stephen harbored “a violent temper” that he concealed from the fellow Cambridge graduates who were his friends and colleagues. Woolf analyzes this characteristic as an effect of the interpellation of the ideology of Romantic genius within the male bourgeois Victorian intellectual. Temper was a “convention, supported by the great men of the time, Carlyle, Tennyson, that men of genius were naturally uncontrolled. And genius when my father was a young man was in full flower…. Those who had genius in the Victorian sense were like the prophets; different, another breed. They dressed differently; wore long hair, great black hats, capes and cloaks. They were invariably ‘ill to live with.’ But it never struck my father, I believe, that there was any harm in being ill to live with” (109). Stephen, however, was mortified by the fact that he was in fact not a genius but “only a good second class mind” (110). Awareness of the fact “breaks up the fine steel engraving” (110), releasing an emotionally needy, hectoring, self-centered man, who took out his frustration—since he was living in a large Victorian domestic establishment—on his servants and the female members of his family. The example of Stephen’s domestic authority breaks the image of the engraved figure in a second way. Woolf writes: “He had a godlike, yet childlike, standing in the family. He had an extraordinarily privileged position. I twisted my hair, imitating him. ‘Father does it,’ I told my mother, when she objected. ‘Ah but you can’t do everything father does,’ she said, conveying to me that he was licensed, for he was somehow not bound by the laws of ordinary people”(111). As the quotation suggests, Woolf is especially critical of female complicity with Stephen’s injured sense of entitlement. Woolf’s mother and older step-sister, Stella, massaged it, an indulgence that left Vanessa and Virginia at their father’s mercy once both of the older women died. “It was thus that she [Julia Stephen] left us the legacy of his dependence, which after her death became so harsh an imposition. It would have [been] better for our relationship if she had left him to fend for himself. But for many years she made a fetish of his health; and so—leaving the effect upon us out of the reckoning—she wore herself out and died at forty-nine; while he lived on, and found it very difficult, so healthy was he, to die of cancer at the age of seventy-two” (133). Woolf refers to 1897–1904, the period between the death of Stella and her father, as “the seven unhappy years. Not many lives were tortured and fretted and made numb with non-being as ours were then…. I am not thinking of mother and of Stella; I am thinking of the damage that their deaths inflicted” (136). Particularly disturbing was her father’s

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  101 ritual of looking over the household accounts every Wednesday, a spectacle of rage, victimization, and, ultimately, appeals to his daughters’ sympathy that Woolf and her sister were subjected to on a weekly basis.64 As the older daughter, Vanessa was particularly the target of her father’s abuse. But Woolf was forced to watch these spectacles in silence. “Never have I felt such rage and such frustration. For not a word of what I felt—that unbounded contempt for him and of pity for Nessa—could be expressed” (144). Recalling these events late in A Sketch, Woolf portrays her father degenerated to the condition of a caged brute. “At the age of sixty-five he was a man in prison, isolated. He had so ignored, or disguised his own feelings that he had no idea of what he was; and no idea of what other people were. Hence the horror and the terror of those violent displays of rage. There was something blind, animal, savage in them. Roger Fry said that civilisation means awareness; he was uncivilised in his extreme unawareness. He did not realise what he did. No one could enlighten him. Yet he suffered. Through the walls of his prison he had moments of realisation” (146). A Sketch ends by coming more or less full circle to the account provided by Woolf of her introduction to Society by George Duckworth in “22 Hyde Park Gate.” In these pages, Woolf provides a synthetic account of how she and her sister experienced Victorian society on the verge of its end in 1900. The dominating figures remain her aged father and George, who used the privileges at his disposal to secure a sinecure for himself in a new century to which he was ill suited. Woolf repeatedly describes her late Victorian world as a “machine” (150). First and foremost was “the intellectual machine” (153) of public school and University known to her father and his peers. “Almost brainless” (152), George could not succeed there. But, with two orphaned step-sisters to squire after 1904, he sought and found success in “the social machine” (153). A “perfect fossil of the Victorian age” (151), George filled in the frame of the machine “with all kinds of minutely-teethed saws; and the machine into which our rebellious bodies were inserted in 1900 not only held us tight in its framework, but bit into us with innumerable sharp teeth” (152). These words indicate the price that Woolf and her sister paid for the beauty bequeathed them by their aunts and great aunts.65 But beauty exacts other prices as well: the need to ready oneself for the marriage market; the capital required to nourish and sustain that beauty; and commitment to the ideologies that sustain capital. A woman in this position “must use whatever charm or beauty she possessed to flatter and cajole the busy men, the soldiers, the lawyers, the ambassadors, the cabinet ministers who wanted recreation after their day’s work. Consciously she must accept their views, and fall in with their decrees because it was only so that she could wheedle them into giving her the means to marry

102 Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes or marriage itself. In short all her conscious effort must be in favour of what Lady Lovelace called ‘our splendid Empire’…, ‘the price of which,’ she added, ‘is mainly paid by women.’”66 Capital required a third machine, that of Empire, with which many of Woolf’s relatives had long been associated.67 Use of the metaphor was widespread among members of Bloomsbury.68 Expressing his reluctance to return to Ceylon after a sabbatical in London in 1911, for example, Leonard Woolf remarks that “the prospect of the sophisticated, Europeanized life of Colombo, the control of the wheels of the intricate machinery of central administration, with the dreary pomp and circumstance of imperial government, filled me with misgiving and disgust” (48). Similarly, after pointing to nationalism, militarism, and imperialism as the causes of World War I, Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), comments on how a newly unified Germany had “transformed herself into a vast and complicated industrial machine, dependent for its working on the equipoise of many factors outside Germany as well as within.”69 Given the late date at which A Sketch was written, its emphasis on psychical division makes sense in psychoanalytic terms although Woolf also addresses ideological and pedagogical bases of psychical splitting. Her comment on the unconscious desire for war experienced by privileged young women in 1914 indicates her awareness of the way in which macropolitical factors blended with women’s “unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity.”70 In Eminent Victorians, Woolf knew a book that implicitly explored in psychoanalytic terms “the frenzies of Empire.”71 A Sketch echoes Strachey’s practice of doubling the portraits of his protagonists with unconscious effects. “The End of General Gordon” is revealing in its analysis of epistemological fault lines within the psyches of both colonizers and colonized. The chapter focuses on General Gordon’s death at the siege of Khartoum in 1885. But a lengthy excursus dealing with spectacular events in China in which he was involved early in his career is particularly telling. The fracturing of local knowledges and authority as a result of Western incursion is illustrated in the career of Tien Wang, formerly Hongsiu-tsuen, who, as a schoolteacher in 1837, was converted to Christianity following a serious illness. Religious dissidence soon became political. “The new doctrine, working upon the mystical ferment already in Hong’s mind, produced a remarkable result. He was, he declared, the prophet of God; he was more—he was the son of God; he was Tien Wang, the Celestial King; he was the younger brother of Jesus. The times were propitious, and proselytes soon gathered around him. Having conceived a grudge against the Government owing to his failure in

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an examination, Hong gave a political turn to his teaching, which soon developed into a propaganda of rebellion against the rule of the Manchus and the Mandarins” (192). Following an unsuccessful attempt by the authorities to suppress him, Hong and his followers by 1850 had overrun the delta of the Yangtse river and taken possession of Nanking in a quest to establish “Taiping, the reign of eternal peace” (192). They even succeeded in occupying “the semi-European city of Shanghai” for more than a year. Finally put on the defensive by the Manchu Empire, they were rescued as a result of the occupation of Peking by an English expeditionary force in 1860 including the destruction of the Summer Palace by order of Lord Elgin, an action dryly discerned by Strachey as an act of “vengeance in the name of European civilization upon the barbarism of the East” (191). After the imperial defeat, Hong’s men recovered their former territories and threatened to retake Shanghai as well, a danger which provided Gordon an opportunity when he was hired in 1863 by the local merchants to lead a ragtag mercenary force to ward off the attackers. Over a period of 18 months, he was able to use his expertise as a military engineer to retake the Yangtse delta and to place the Chinese army in position to take Nanking and suppress the rebellion. As a result of his success, “Chinese Gordon” won fame in England. The Taiping Rebellion is a good example of how a totalizing ideology from abroad, enforced by new modes of power, can disrupt a previously prevailing order with overwhelming political and economic effects. The circumstances in which Gordon met his end provide a similar example. His “last great adventure, like his first, was occasioned by a religious revolt” (208). In this case, Mahommed Ahmed, who later renamed himself the Mahdi, undertook a campaign in the Sudan against weak Egyptian overlords, heavily indebted to European fi nanciers. Ahmed, the son of an obscure cleric, fell out “with the Sheikh from whom he was receiving religious instruction [and] set up as an independent preacher” (209). In his case, not infidelity but heresy provided the grounds of a revised epistemology though, as in Hong’s case, Christian missionary work likely also had a hand in the emergence of the Mahdi. In the theory of the twelfth imam, Shiite Islam included within its theological system the possibility of the arrival of a new voice with a new truth but from within rather than outside the faith.72“There is an ancient tradition in the Mohammedan world, telling of a mysterious being, the last in succession of the twelve holy Imams, who, untouched by death and withdrawn into the recesses of a mountain, was destined, at the appointed hour, to come forth again among men. His title was the Mahdi, the guide; some believed that he would be the forerunner of the Messiah; others that he would be Christ himself” (209).

104  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes The Mahdi quickly assembled forces and took control of much of the Sudan. In these desperate circumstances, Gordon, who at the time was about to leave England for the Congo in the service of Leopold II, was entrusted with the task of retrieving a garrison of Egyptian troops under English command at Khartoum. Because an indecisive Liberal government at home authorized reinforcement too late, Khartoum fell; and Gordon was killed on January 26, 1885. The Mahdi himself died shortly afterwards of natural causes. Strachey’s essay ends with the report of the destruction of his “empire” 13 years later by British troops under the direction of Major Herbert Kitchener. Armed with machine guns, they massacred the followers of the Mahdi at Omdurman: “At any rate,” Strachey writes, “it had all ended very happily—in the glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs [—and] a vast addition to the British Empire” (266). With these final words, Strachey discloses the object and method of his life of General Gordon: namely to use nineteenth-century examples to emphasize to his contemporaries the basis of World War I in the imperial projects of Western Europe. None of the book’s first readers could have read the name of Kitchener, who as Secretary of State for War in 1914–1915 had been responsible for military recruitment and the procurement of munitions, without being aware that the gunnery used on Africans in the Sudan had proven to be equally lethal on the battlefields of the Western Front. Throughout the essay, Strachey references terms that might provide a structure in terms of which Gordon’s biography and adventures could be narrated: fate, fortune, destiny, providence, progress, the civilizing mission of the West, “egoism” (200), misdirected personal ambition, and “the hard logic of events” (214), this last a phrase evidently referring to the tendency for expansionary Western powers to fill global space. While the eschatological fantasies and circumstances that propelled Hong, the Mahdi, and their followers are not surprising within this context, Strachey is equally interested to show how the same contagion affected the imperial hero himself. Gordon too had become a religious fanatic, insisting on the literal truth of a Bible that he was licensed to interpret at will. As a result, Strachey writes, Gordon was able to play out “his deep unconscious instincts as the mysterious manifestations of the indwelling God” (200). The network of elite male institutions that fostered the egoism of Leslie Stephen and George and Gerald Duckworth likewise prompted Gordon’s “arbitrary temper of command” (199). The military machine meshed with the social and intellectual machines Woolf describes at the end of A Sketch. Like Strachey’s, her study, instead of ending with a decisive break between the Victorian period and the modern age, returns obsessively to the torture machine, implicitly compared with a savage beast, that she imagines continually to tear at her. Had Woolf’s death by suicide in 1941 not severed A Sketch, she likely would next have moved to what in the biography she designates as the

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  105 moment of cleavage between Victorian and modernist public cultures, in other words, toward Post-Impressionism. In this usage, the phrase refers to the utopian time that included the Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912, the Ballets Russes’s London seasons in 1911 and 1912, and the birth of an English avant-garde art in the work of Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant. In the remaining pages, I consider whether Woolf’s sense of the “profound changes” occurring in 1911 can be of use in further elaborating Benjamin’s concept of “the time of the now” (261). In doing so, I extend the purview of Post-Impressionism so as to include other efforts by himself, Virginia Woolf, and other members of Bloomsbury such as Strachey and Keynes, in the first instance up to 1919 but in actuality continuing into the 1930s and even into the post-World War II period.73 To consider transformative or what I will call here evental change as occurring over the course of a generation requires acknowledgment that the process is not instantaneous. Instead, the Post-Impressionist Movement may be considered as one of those points of origin that Benjamin refers to as “shot through with chips of Messianic time” (263). Post-Impressionism in this sense is not only aesthetic and intellectual. It occurred at a time of major political and social change, for one the militant phase of the pre-War movement for female suffrage, which threatened the gendered basis of male professional privilege. Female agency was also exercised in the streets and in the workplace in the dramatic form of the walkout of poorly paid female workers in confectionery factories in Bermondsey in East London in August, 1911.74 There women marched in support of the national strike currently under way among transport and dock workers but also, successfully, for wage increases at work. In Parliament, 1911 was also the year in which the “New Liberal” government passed the National Insurance Act, which for the first time instituted a contributory entitlement program to provide financial support for workers in times of illness and unemployment.75 In 1912, a brief introduction to charity work in the East End slum of Hoxton under the direction of Marny Vaughn, a cousin of his future wife, “turned” Leonard Woolf “from a liberal into a socialist” (100). In the same year, he met Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the secretary of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. The Guild was a large-scale voluntary enterprise, primarily of manual workers and their families, that focused on producing, transporting, and selling domestic necessities to its members at low prices. Woolf, who made a careful study of the organization in his 1919 work, Co-operation and the Future of Industry, saw in it the possibility of creating a modern commercial-industrial society organized around the needs of consumers rather than in the service of either state socialism or private profit (106). His retrospective assessment of this effort in Beginning Again throws light on just what a Jetztzeit might mean not as an apocalyptic break but as an opening of one’s senses, intellect, and relations with others toward creating together with them a

106  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes new way of living. He comments: “I still agree with the greater part of what I wrote in that book 45 years ago, though my vision of a socialist society based on consumers’ control now sounds utopian, because the events of history have turned in the opposite direction. The view that everything which has not happened was always utopian, however, seems to me false—it is one of the commonest forms of stupidity after the event” (106). Christopher Reed considers the years 1910–1912 to be the apex of the Bloomsbury vanguard both in the visual arts and in their experiments in communal living arrangements at Asheham House and 38 Brunswick Square. Breaking from Victorian domestic conventions, before their engagement Leonard and Virginia shared a house in Bloomsbury with Grant, his lover Keynes, and Woolf’s brother Adrian.76 Members of this group, their families, and friends experimented with unconventional marriages and other queer domestic arrangements such as the trio of Grant, David Garnett, and Vanessa Bell that in 1916 lived at Wissett Lodge, a small rundown farm that Grant and Garnett, both pacifists, worked in hope of obtaining deferment from military service as agricultural workers. These efforts continued in 1916 and 1917 at Charleston, where Bell and Grant produced possibly the two most important paintings by English Post-Modernists: The Tub (1917–1918) by Bell and Grant’s The Kitchen (1914, reworked 1916–1917).77 For the Post-Impressionists and Bloomsbury, shared intimacy also meant the sharing of ideas in conversation, a practice that Virginia Woolf associates in “Old Bloomsbury” with the circle of Cambridge Apostles who regularly visited the home at 46 Gordon Square to which she and Vanessa moved following their father’s death.78 This practice is echoed in turn in Keynes’s practice as a diplomat and economist who thought of “economics as a method of molding ideas and opinions in an exchange with others.”79 When, following the War, Woolf in late 1921 or early 1922 memorialized these years in a paper for the Memoir Club, she judged the sort of enthusiasm shown by Leonard to be “tinged” by “lustre and illusion.”80 The effect of disenchantment continued in commentaries on Bloomsbury in the second half of the twentieth century cited by Reed. As late at the 1960s, however, Leonard Woolf continued to reject both materialist naturalism and utopian pessimism: “It was, I still believe, touch and go whether the movement towards liberty and equality—political and social—and towards civilization, which was strong in the first decade of the 20th century, would become so strong as to carry everything before it” (36). Early in World War I, the Fabian Socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb recruited Leonard “to write a report on international government for the Labour Party” in consultation with themselves and other members of the Fabian Society Research Bureau, most notably George Bernard

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  107 Shaw.81 The draft report was approved in April, 1915, and served as an important basis for discussions at a conference held that year about the need to establish “an international judicial system.” The meeting included “leaders in the new League of Nations movement.” Also in 1915, in collaboration with Sydney Webb, Woolf wrote “a draft treaty designed to prevent war.” Both reports were published that year as Special Supplements to the Labour party journal, the New Statesman, and appeared a year later, with minor revisions, as Parts I and III of Leonard’s book, International Government.82 Virginia Woolf contributed research for Part II of the book, which deals with international issues in “health, labor, and commerce” (2). International Government “emphasizes the importance of cooperation within the international community to prevent war.” It contains recommendations for establishing an international government composed of three elements: a Secretariat, to administer and coordinate government functions; an International Council of member states, and an International High Court (3). Widely read and circulated among proponents of international government, contacts in the British Foreign Office, and at the White House in Washington, Woolf’s recommendations provided a blueprint for draft proposals for the organizational structure of a League of Nations put forward by the British and U.S. governments at Versailles in 1919 (4–8). In an obituary that appeared in the London Times at the time of Leonard Woolf’s death in 1969, it was pointed out that the “vision” shown by Woolf in Part II of his book “played an important part in giving concrete form to the general ideas about a League then current, and in particular in launching the conception of the League’s technical social, economic and financial work, which has developed into a dozen U. N. Agencies, from the I. L.O. (International Labor Organization) and the International Bank to the World Meteorological Organisations.”83 In the 1940s, Keynes’s work in service to the British Treasury involved him in follow-up visits to Washington subsequent to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. His task was to conserve Great Britain’s empire and thereby its claim to great power status, objectives with which he did not sympathize and which in the event proved to be out of reach.84 Within this particular context, however, Keynes was able to achieve a larger, global goal: namely the creation of international financial institutions and regulations that made possible a generation of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in Western Europe, Britain’s former settler colonies, and the United States. As Maria Marcuzzo argues: “In the case of postwar international economics, he fought to persuade governments,” that, as Keynes put it, “only by a more comprehensive settlement, which attempts to offer everyone what is reasonable, and so far as we can make it fair, [can] the financial consequences of the war…be liquidated.”85 This ambition recalls his early experience as the official

108  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, a position that he resigned in protest when he recognized that he would be unable to mitigate the severe economic penalties to be imposed upon the defeated German and Austro-Hungarian side.86 Out of this disillusion came his first book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), an international best seller important because it made the ethical case for a just peace.87 Joseph Schumpeter remarks that the book “met with a reception that makes the word Success [sic] sound commonplace and insipid.”88 Keynes’s impassioned words in this book did much to create an anti-nationalist, pacifist, and anti-imperial outlook in Britain and abroad. In doing so, he carried forward the pacifist work that Post-Impressionists and members of Bloomsbury such as the Woolfs, Vanessa Bell, Grant, and Garnett undertook at significant price to themselves during the War. In a classic essay on the malaise in English intellectual life in the generation between and following the World Wars, Perry Anderson singles out Keynes as one of the few exceptions to what Anderson finds to be the general mediocrity of academic culture in the social sciences and humanities.89 In his survey of British intellectual life, Anderson recognizes only one important female intellectual, Melanie Klein. And he excludes “creative art” (216) from his survey on the grounds that the arts “do not directly provide our basic concepts of man and society” (217). Virginia Woolf thought differently. Because Anderson sees culture and society to be structured primarily by relations of class, he overlooks the importance of gender and sexual relations in shaping totality. Further, Anderson was at an added disadvantage in recognizing the significance of a theorist like Woolf who often worked within the genres of the literary essay, art criticism, and the novel, genres in which he does not recognize that theoretical work is possible.90 Both of Woolf’s book-length theoretical texts are composites of literary genres: fiction, the biographical essay, literary history, literary criticism, and prophecy. One, Three Guineas is an important theoretical work focusing on formal education, the structure of the patriarchal family, and private and public violence.91 A Room of One’s Own (1929) is another, focusing on women’s place in the institution of literature.92 Woolf’s modernist masterworks, informed by Fry and Vanessa’s Bell’s emphasis on formal design in the individual work of art, postdated by a decade the experiments of the English Post-Impressionists. In the intervening decade, World War I had taken place. Incorporating the shocks of modern warfare, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1932) carry within their achieved modernity a conviction of the existence of death in the present moment.93 But the future, although denied full alterity, is not for that reason foreclosed. Did the Post-­ Impressionist Exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 constitute decisive events as

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  109 Fry, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and many others thought at the time? The subsequent careers of the inhabitants of 38 Brunswick Square as sketched above suggest that the answer to this question is yes. Martin Jay suggests that “traditional historians” write “conventional emplotted stories” in which “events, at least significant ones, are understood “as hinge moments in… coherent narratives.”94 Theorists of the “event” since the incidents of May, 1968, in France, however, have contended that such occurrences evade the conventions, predictability—and certitude—of contextualizing accounts. Recently, one of these writers, Claude Romano, has argued that “rather than instances of a static ontology, events… are more like what Nietzsche called ‘lightning flashes,’ which are radical breaks in the status quo.” Unlike happenings that are readily understandable in already given terms, events “radically upend their context and, far from being submitted to a horizon of prior meaning, are themselves the origin of meaning for any interpretation, in that they can be understood less from the world that preceded them than from the posterity to which they give rise.”95 Such are the events of the Post-Impressionist exhibitions and the movement to which they gave rise.

Notes 1 Baldick, The Modern Movement, 176, 188. 2 This work is the first of three novels that make up Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. 3 Banfield, The Phantom Table, ix, xii, hereafter cited in text and notes as Banfield (2000). For Fry, see p. x. Christine Froula reviews the book in “Grand Illusions.” 4 Banfield (2000), xiii–xiv. See also Zwerdling. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. 5 Banfield argues the significance for Woolf of Russell’s epistemology of time in “Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism, and Cambridge.” See also Banfield, “Cambridge Bloomsbury.” 6 “Time Passes,” 252. 7 For an accessible account of the term, see Badiou, Saint Paul. In both Badiou and Benjamin, eschatological concepts of time in Judeo-Christian belief are in play. I use the word “evential” as an adjectival form referring to “event” in this sense (Romano, Event and World, 38—hereafter cited in notes as Romano). In contrast to Banfield’s account, which is conceptualized within the terms of analytic philosophy, Jesse Matz emphasizes the phenomenological character of Woolf’s thinking: “Woolf’s impressions rarely kept to the level of immediate apprehension…; rather, they partook of a phenomenological awareness in which immediate visual apprehension was one with essential thought” (Matz, “Pseudo-Impressionism,” 116). 8 Foucault, The Order of Things, 299; Banfield, xi. 9 See Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis.

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112  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes detail than does Freud himself. See also Laplanche and Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 26–29. 50 Lee, 51, 54. 51 Quotations from A Sketch in the preceding paragraph refer to p. 68. 52 Woolf understands memory in a fashion similar to that of Walter Benjamin. In a memoir of his Berlin childhood composed in 1932, Benjamin writes: “Language shows that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” Citing the quotation, Mike Taussig observes: one digs and digs in this ground scattering the earth searching meticulously for its real treasure, ‘the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.’ (Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 23) 53 Woolf had earlier provided an account of George Duckworth’s unwanted advances during her late adolescence in “22 Hyde Park Gate” (Moments of Being, 164–177). Keynes reacted in defense of male privilege when, after having heard the paper, he said: “The best thing you ever did was your Memoir on George. You should pretend to write about real people and make it all up” (162). In the paper, Woolf criticizes de facto female complicity in George’s conduct. Lee provides a careful account of the textual evidence concerning George’s behavior (151–156, 777n.68). 54 Woolf spoke of the ms of A Sketch as “notes” (75) for a book. 55 The view is consistent with Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. 56 Janet Lyon finds another counterpart of “the other face” that Woolf dreams of seeing in the mirror in another memory from childhood that Woolf records later in A Sketch. In this instance, she recalls the uncanny effect of coming across an idiot boy during an otherwise unexceptional walk in Kensington Gardens. Woolf was instantaneously possessed by “dumb horror” at “the… moment when the idiot boy sprang up with his hand outstretched mewing, slit-eyed, red-rimmed; and without saying a word, with a sense of the horror in me, I poured into his hand a bag of Russian toffee” (78). See Lyon, 567–569. My interest in the dream adheres to its primary context in relation to Woolf’s account on pp. 68–69. 57 Reed, 67–68. 58 Ibid., 65–86. 59 “Walter Sickert,” Collected Essays, 2: 234. 60 Savage in this sentence is not used as Gauguin uses the term. See the discussion in Chapter 1. 61 157. 62 Woolf, Three Guineas, 49. 63 Ibid., 33. Steve Ellis provides a highly critical reading of the statement of this ideal in Woolf’s essay, “The Leaning Tower.” See his study, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians, 147–153. For an alternative view, see Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. 64 The ritual apparently was not unusual in Victorian and Edwardian households. Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp (1924) begins with a similar scene. 65 See, for example, Woolf’s essays, “Pattledom” and “Julia Margaret Cameron,” in Essays, 4: 280–282, 375–386. 66 Three Guineas, 39. 67 Reid, 4–5; Lee, 50–78.

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  113

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114 Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes Harcourt, Inc. reissue of the book (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, xxxv– lxi). Gubar’s phrase appears on p. lx. 93 Jacqueline Rose canvases this topic in “Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism.” 94 Jay, “Historical Explanation and the Event,” 563, 563–564. 95 Romano, Event and World, 38.

Bibliography Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. Anderson, Perry. “Components of the National Culture.” In Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn. Baltimore, MD: New Left Review, 1969. Pp. 214–284. Aristotle, Poetics. Trans. and introd. Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin, 1996. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003. Baldick, Chris. The Modern Movement. Volume 10: 1910–1940. The Oxford English Literary History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. Banfield, Ann. “Cambridge Bloomsbury.” In The Bloomsbury Group, ed. Victoria Rosner. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. 33–53. ———. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000. ———. “Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism, and Cambridge Time.” Poetics Today, 24.3 (Fall 2003): 471–516. Bell, Vanessa. Selected Letters. Ed. Regina Marler. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Boll, Theophilus E. M. “May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106 (August 1962): 310–326. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Broughton, Panthea Reid. “The Attenuated Self and Meta-Memoir.” Review, 10 (1988): 125–136. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003. De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988. Ellis, Steve. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. Forstater, Mathew, and L. Randall Wray, jt. ed. Keynes for the Twenty-First Century: The Continuing Relevance of the General Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994. Froula, Christine. “Grand Illusions.” Women’s Review of Books, 18.4 ( January 2001): 17–18. ———. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005.

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  115 Fry, Roger. Vision and Design. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Galbraith, James K. “Keynes and Globalization.” In Keynes for the Twenty-­ First Century: The Continuing Relevance of the General Theory, ed. Mathew Forstater and L. Randall Wray. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 207–212. Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985. Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. New York: Free Press, 2006. Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003. Hall, Radclyffe. The Unlit Lamp. New York: Dial Press, 1981. Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2003. Jay, Martin. “Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections on the Limits of Contextualization.” New Literary History, 42.4 (Autumn 2011): 557–571. Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Hamburg: Management Laboratory Press, 2009. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation.” In Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945. Introd. R. E. Money-Kyrle. New York: Free Press, 1975. Pp. 306–343. Kregel, Jan. “The Continuing Policy Relevance of Keynes’s General Theory.” In Keynes for the Twenty-First Century: The Continuing Relevance of the General Theory, ed. Mathew Forstater and L. Randall Wray. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 127–144. Krugman, Paul. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations. New York: Norton, 1994. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. Pp. 1–7. Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith and introd. Daniel Lagache. New York: Norton, 1973. Lavoie, Marc. Introduction to Post-Keynesian Economics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1999. Lewis, David. “Matisse and Byzantium, or, Mechanization Takes Command.” Modernism/Modernity, 16 (January 2009): 51–59. Lyon, Janet. “On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew.” Modernism/Modernity, 18 (September 2011): 551–574. Manson, Janet M. “Leonard Woolf as an Architect of the League of Nations.” 2007. www/clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/ser/woolf_league.pdf

116  Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina. “Keynes and Persuasion.” In Keynes for the TwentyFirst Century: The Continuing Relevance of the General Theory, ed. Mathew Forstater and L. Randall Wray. New York: Palgrave. Pp. 23–40. Matz, Jesse. “Pseudo-Impressionism?” In The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012. Pp. 114–132. Nicolson, Juliet. The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just before the Storm. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale and trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997. Noel-Baker, Philip. “Mr. Leonard Woolf: Vision of International Cooperation.” London Times, 21 August, 1969, 8. Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000. Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004. Reid, Panthea. Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. Reynolds, David. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 2014. Romano, Claude. Event and World. Trans. Shane Mackinlay. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2009. Rose, Jacqueline. “Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism.” Raritan, 18 (Fall 1998): 1–18. Rosenbaum, Stanford Patrick. The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975. ———. Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Rothstein, Edward. “Authors in Rooms of Their Own.” New York Times, Friday, February 24, 2012, C23, C30. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965. Shone, Richard. The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999. Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes. 3 vols. New York: Viking, 1986, 1994, 2001. Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. London: Granada Publishing, 1980. Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. Introd. Michael Holroyd. London: Penguin, 1986. Taussig, Michael. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006. Watney, Simon. The Art of Duncan Grant. London: John Murray, 1999. Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964. Woolf, Virginia. Books and Portraits: Some Further Selections from the Literary and Biographical Writings. Ed. Mary Lyon. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.

Virginia Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes  117 ———. Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953–1967. ———. Essays. 5 vols. [to date]. London: Hogarth Press, 1986–2009. ———. Freshwater: A Comedy. Ed. Lucio P. Ruotolo. Drawings by Edward Gorey. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1985. ———. Letters. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. 6: 1936–1941. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. ———. Moments of Being. Ed. and introd. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd edition. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1985. ———. Roger Fry: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968. ———. A Room of One’s Own. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005. ———. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986.

5

“A New Space of Time” Determining the Future in The Years

If Cambridge epistemology took a dualistic view of material reality in light of the discoveries of early twentieth-century physics, its view of time was similarly double.1 Bertrand Russell, for instance, drew a distinction between concepts of time that he considered to be illusory and those that he considered to be true. The first he described as “A Series” time, the second as “B Series” time. An example of “A Series” time is time thought of in terms of the sequence: past, present, future. Time thus understood is subjective since it depends upon the point of view of a particular individual or set of individuals. In fact, a single point of time might be any one of these three, depending on the positioning of an individual in relation to a particular moment. In contrast, what Russell considers to be objective or “B Series” time is continuous. Clock time and fixed dates are examples of “B Series” time. Like Henri Bergson in another context, Russell compares the experience of B Series time with that of the sequence of images that might be caught in successive frames of film by a motion-picture camera or “cinematograph.” “The continuity of the motion is shown in the fact that, however near together we take…two positions and… two instants, there are an infinite number of positions still nearer together.”2 Taken individually, each frame may be thought of as a record of sight at a particular moment. If one can experience time in this way, however, one can also imagine time as a series of “shots” taken so quickly between existing frames as to be invisible to any single subject. These imagined sites suggest the idea of time as a series of moments independent of both viewer and modern technology. It remains, however, to be considered how such moments are related. Woolf was both responsive and resistant to Cambridge epistemology. In light of the discoveries of the atomic structure of material reality, for both Woolf and her husband Leonard, the critique of common-sense observations of objects in space became a defining axiom of modernity. But Russell’s rejection of individual consciousness as a privileged point of entry into experience negated a basic axiom of her modernist aesthetics.3 The weight of Cambridge prestige, to which was added the weight of her personal friendship with Russell, required Woolf to meet

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  119 this challenge. When Woolf theorizes what she calls moments of being, she is concerned that they be not merely personal, potentially solipsistic, as Russell claims them to be, but also that they be capable of fixing, for an instant, the pattern in which they exist.4 In A Sketch of the Past, she speculates that a moment of being “is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words.” This “real thing” is “a pattern: … the whole world is a work of art; … we are parts of the work of art.”5 In contrast to Russell’s divorce of fact from consciousness, in these lines Woolf takes a dialectical approach whereby she attempts to conserve not only the stop-action shot, so to speak, but a context in which it makes human sense. Woolf sees all meaning as participating in self-conscious reflection (“the whole world is a work of art”). Individual being coheres only insofar as it is engaged in this work (“we are parts of the work of art”). She is at pains, however, to reject both traditional religious approaches, which hypothesize the existence of a divine consciousness as the source of order in time and secularized versions of this view which locate order in History with a capital H in nineteenth-century writing by Hegel and Marx.6 Long before, Aristotle had considered the question as to whether the fact of an event implied its necessity. His answer was: partially so. In other words, if each distinct moment before an event such as a sea fight happened as it in fact did happen, then the battle became inevitable. In retrospect, what happens is determined. But Aristotle did not believe that the sequence of events was itself determined.7 With an eye to consequences, one might choose—in one’s present—to act in another way and thereby alter the course of the sequence. While Russell emphasizes the illusory character of the three aspects of A Series time, Woolf is concerned instead with the ways in which past elements are braided within the present as well as by the proleptic relation between the present moment and possible futures. These temporal concerns determine the structure of The Years with regard to both series. Time in The Years is multiple. As in Aristotle’s interpretation, an actual event cannot have been other than it is. But, thinking forward, one has at least two options, possibly more. Both Woolf’s novel and John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) are structured in this triple dimension. Keynes, for example, points out the fact that, although inevitable once it occurred, before World War I upper- and upper-middle-class Britons anticipated that they would continue to enjoy a high standard of living and seemingly unlimited opportunities for economic investment in a future without cease. “The inhabitant of London,” he writes, “regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions,

120  “A New Space of Time” in The Years and exclusions, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.”8 In his account of the causes of the War, Keynes emphasized such facts as the growth in world population since 1870, which prompted in turn a struggle among nations for scarce resources. Looking forward, Keynes recognized two alternative possibilities: first, the creation of a new world order by the victors of World War I in their dealings with the vanquished that would help restore the shattered economies of Central and Eastern Europe; second, the failure to do so, which, in Keynes’s view, would make a second, more intensive, World War inevitable. With it, he believed that what remained of European civilization after 1919 would be destroyed. Keynes was impelled to this conclusion by his role as a witness to the failure of the Versailles Peace Conference, as a result of which he had resigned as financial representative of the British Treasury to the talks. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he denounces the resulting Treaty and warns in the strongest terms that, unless remedied, it will lead to catastrophe. Keynes casts this likely outcome in the form of Greek tragedy: “Paris was a nightmare, and every one there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of the decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without—all the elements of ancient tragedy were there. Seated indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French Saloons of State, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and of Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging characterization, were really faces at all and not the tragi-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet show” (16). Nonetheless, at the end of the book Keynes, appealing to the youth, casts forward to a possibly different future, one that will depend upon the emergence of “the true voice” of a “new generation” which “has not yet spoken.” Rescue must depend upon “the enlargement and instructions of men’s [sic] hearts and minds” (166). Writing in the early to mid-1930s when young men such as her nephew, Julian Bell, and George Orwell volunteered for military service in opposing Fascism in General Franco’s Spain, Woolf and Leonard were highly aware of the advent of a new and greater tragedy. Nonetheless, the final pages of The Years indicate that she had not given up on the possibility of transformative time that she, Keynes, and others in her circle had experienced in the Post-Impressionist movement of the years immediately preceding World War I. Indeed, both Keynes’s book and The Years are continuing experiments toward that end. Woolf established the general framework of the novel within Russell’s B Series time. Beginning with 1880, dates of years serve as the titles of

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  121 the book’s chapters (1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1914, 1917, 1918, “Present Day”). At times, the logic of selection appears to be merely sequential while other dates, associated with historically important events such as the General Strike of 1926 and the economic crash of 1929, are passed over in silence. In years in which significant events in History with a capital H occurred such as the death of Edward VII in 1910, the event may be acknowledged but with reductive irony. “1910” ends when Sara and Maggie Pargiter, cousins of Eleanor Pargiter, a major figure in the novel, hear a man wheeling a barrow down the street cry out that the King is dead. At the same time, other dates could signify end-time: England declared war on Germany in August, 1914; the ­armistice was declared in November, 1918. And 1910, a year in which Woolf once declared that human nature had changed, was the date of the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition.9 At times, important events are registered obliquely. For example, in 1910, an important year in the struggle for women’s suffrage, Eleanor and a number of other key women in the novel attend a public meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in order to discuss tactical issues.10 Choosing not to put political rhetoric at the center of the struggle for equality, Woolf indicates the purpose of the meeting only obliquely when a member of the group argues against the use of violence in pursuing their objective. In dealing with dates in this variety of ways, Woolf undercuts the importance of standard historical chronology and of the field of academic history itself as defined in terms of important dates. As well, some so-called historical dates are not all that important while ones that are may be passed over. In the list above, the two most important events occur in the field of the visual arts and in the formation of affinity groups, in this case of the meeting of men and women, including several related women who are introduced in the 1880 chapter, in order to lobby for political rights for women. Violence is at the forefront of Woolf’s attention because she regards armed struggle between nations and male violence against women as closely related phenomena. In Three Guineas (1938), which draws on discursive material contained in unpublished drafts of the novel, she argues that war can be avoided in future only if relations between the sexes within bourgeois culture are placed on a new foundation. In particular, the subjection of women within the upper-middle-class home must be ended—an objective that will also require radical changes in education and the professions. In addition to equal rights within marriage and the family, Woolf’s writing shows her concern regarding the need for a wider range of options in domestic arrangements, ranging from elective celibacy to same-sex partnerships and friendship and intimacy across genders. Hence the primary focus of the novel is on the lives of female members of the Pargiters, a late Victorian professional family living in London.

122  “A New Space of Time” in The Years Woolf chose a new genre, which she called that of the “Novel-Essay,” for the first draft of the novel, posthumously published under the title The Pargiters (1977).11 In The Pargiters, she alternates an account of the domestic lives of the Pargiter siblings, male and female, with a discursive analysis of how discrimination on the basis of gender produces personal and social inequality as well as distinctive masculine and feminine character traits, including an ingrained inclination to warfare, that will later determine behavior in both the domestic and the public spheres. In this way, she joins Keynes in addressing a specifically younger readership. By the end of The Pargiters, analysis and fiction are fused. Woolf’s effective deployment of the new genre, while helping seed Three Guineas, also obviated further need to continue The Years in the form of the Novel-Essay. From this point forward, the novel functions primarily as a work of feminist genealogical fiction. The senior Pargiters die, the Pargiter siblings become adults, and some marry and reproduce. However, in keeping with the skepticism of Cambridge epistemology toward common-sense understandings of the worlds of space and time, The Years avoids plot, conventional character development, and description. Nor is it preoccupied with marriage, property, courtship, and adultery as is the case with the genre of the social chronicle novel popular when The Years was written.12 In contrast to works such as John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, genealogy in The Years is discontinuous, fractured by modernist techniques of montage as well as occasional surreal effects drawn from silent cinema. Characters come and go, then return with little ado. Focus shifts suddenly to hitherto minor personae. At times, passing figures of the urban scene acquire momentary but compelling significance, then are lost to the narrative. As well, the novel parts with the most characteristic unifying feature of Woolf’s modernist masterworks, namely, their intensive exploration of individual psychological interiority. Rejecting representation in terms of the conventions of Edwardian and Victorian fictions, Woolf approaches the composition of the novel in the spirit of avant-garde cinema. In her essay, “The Cinema” (1926), she argues that the medium of silent film negates the work of representation that appears, to “the ordinary eye, the English unaesthetic eye,” to be its raison d’être.13 Instancing a newsreel in which the King shakes hands with the members of a football team, Woolf observes that cinema requires that “the brain” actively assist the eye.14 The moving images “have taken on a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life. They have become not more beautiful, in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life”: “we see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence, its cares, its conventions” (349).

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  123 To this analytic remove is added the effect of the filmic perception of time in motion. The now of the film, as soon as it is filmed, is in the past.15 This double—and melancholic—awareness is built into the very operation of the medium. As the newsreel continues to unspool, “watching boats sail and waves break, we have time to open the whole of our mind wide to beauty and to register on top of this the queer ­sensation—beauty will continue to be beautiful whether we behold it or not.” Viewers after the event “are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves. Brides are emerging from the Abbey; ushers are ardent; mothers are tearful; guests are joyful; and it is all over and done with” (349). Woolf historicizes this temporal caesura as suggesting a decisive divide between English time before and after August, 1914. As decidedly as film technology, “the war opened its chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance. But it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded, up to the very end. The brain adds all this to what the eye sees upon the screen” (349). These effects reorient perception. Cinema provides us with a self-­ conscious surplus absent from routine sensation. Most significantly, representation in cinema functions—as in Post-Impressionist painting—as form expressive of emotion and affect, both conscious and unconscious. In the essay, Woolf draws a remarkable example from a viewing of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. At a performance of Dr Caligari the other day a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged and sank back again into nonentity. For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively that by words. The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement ‘I am afraid.’ In fact, the shadow was accidental and the effect unintentional. But if a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures, the actual words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression. (350) One of the most important moments in the novel, occurring at the end of “1914,” emphasizes a moment almost incidental in the married life of its protagonist, nèe Kitty Malone, who had been introduced to the reader early in the novel as the daughter of the Master of St. Katherine’s College, Oxford, where her first cousin Eleanor’s brother, Edward, was enrolled as a student.16 Having planned and presided over a fatiguing

124  “A New Space of Time” in The Years high-society party, Kitty, now Lady Lasswade, makes a solitary escape by late-night train from London to her husband’s estate in the north country. Lasswade, whose greatest ambition in youth had been to become a farmer, 17 experiences a sense of freedom when she goes for a walk the next day. The passage details her progress with cinematic cuts that both affirm and subvert the impersonality of montage, placing it in service of a feminist phenomenology. At the same time, the fracturing of Lasswade’s sensorium by continual shifts in focus and perspective doubles the significance of the passage, registering simultaneously both division and the sort of unification of sensibility that Roger Fry regarded as the essence of aesthetic modernism. The wind seemed to rise as she walked under the trees. It sang in their tops, but it was silent beneath. The dead leaves crackled under foot; among them sprang up the pale spring flowers…, trembling on cushions of green moss. Spring was sad always, she thought; it brought back memories. All passes, all changes, she thought, as she climbed up the little path between the trees. Nothing of this belonged to her; her son would inherit; his wife would walk here after her. She broke off a twig; she picked a flower and put it to her lips. But she was in the prime of life; she was vigorous. She strode on. The ground rose sharply; her muscles felt strong and flexible as she pressed her thick-soled shoes to the ground. She threw away her flower. The trees thinned as she strode higher and higher. Suddenly she saw the sky between two striped tree trunks extraordinarily blue. She came out on the top. The wind ceased; the country spread wide all round her. Her body seemed to shrink; her eyes to widen. She threw herself on the ground, and looked over the billowing land that went rising and falling, away and away, until somewhere far off it reached the sea. Uncultivated, uninhabited, existing by itself, for itself, without towns or houses it looked from this height. Dark wedges of shadow, bright breadths of light lay side by side. Then, as she watched, light moved and dark moved; light and shadow went travelling over the hills and over the valleys. A deep murmur sang in her ears—the land itself, singing to itself, a chorus, alone. She lay there listening. She was happy, completely. Time had ceased.18 In the passage, Lasswade experiences time in two different ways. First, and ironically since she walks in springtime, she experiences time weighted with regret and a sense of mortality. For her, this affect is presented as an effect of the knowledge that, under English law, she neither owns nor will inherit her husband’s estate. At his death, succession will fall to the male in nearest direct descent, in this case, her son. Her biological function as mother, in an economy fashioned by men, is to provide a conduit for male genealogy. Like Crosby, the house servant

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  125 of the Pargiters, when the master dies, her duties will be at an end; and she will be cashiered. In the galley proofs, one learns that, following the death of her husband, she is pensioned to “a little Tudor manor-house,” gardening to amuse herself, and practical inconsequence.19 These facts are analytically filtered so that, by stating them in the perspectives of both Lasswade and Eleanor, her observant visitor, Woolf communicates the emotional, affective, and practical effects of even a privileged wife’s unwaged labor. Second, the rising wind betokens a spirit immanent within nature so that last fall’s leaves, though dead, “crackle.” Following, the passage shifts attention to Lasswade’s physical embodiment of this spirit: “She was in the prime of life; she was vigorous. She strode on. The ground rose sharply; her muscles felt strong and flexible as she pressed her thick-soled shoes to the ground…. She strode higher and higher.” At this point, Lasswade experiences a material vision: “Suddenly she saw the sky between two striped tree trunks extraordinarily blue. She came out on the top. The wind ceased.” Experiencing time in a new mode, Lasswade is released into a moment of pure presence. In The Years, however, “symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression” more often have to do with states (and times) of ennui, suppressed awareness, and even repression, individual and collective. At the time of writing, Woolf was preoccupied with the effects on her and others of what Patrick Deer calls the “war culture” cultivated by British government agencies and allied institutions such as the commercial mass media in the decade preceding the onset of World War II. 20 The deleted section, “Wartime London,” provides an anatomy of this culture at the start of World War I. 21 The narration follows a number of persons through a sunny September afternoon: Crosby, out for a walk with her landlady’s grandchildren; Bert Parker, a salesman walking to the tube; Miriam Parrish, a recurring minor figure, on her way by tube to see a West End play with Eleanor. After the play, Eleanor returns by omnibus and on foot to her new apartment in a “vast block of flats”22 on the top floor of a seven-floor walk-up in the suburbs. Despite the absence of a lift, she is thrilled with the magic of her home’s “modern conveniences.” Once inside, “she touched a knob, and the sitting-room was lit. She lit a match and the gas fire was burning. There was her breakfast tray on the kitchen table; and she had only to light the gas ring and the kettle would be boiling in five minutes. Warmth, light, comfort, sprang into being at a touch” (Cs 428, 189). Another aspect of modernity awaiting her, however, is the list of “Casualties” in the evening paper. In it, she finds the name of Captain Lionel Rankin, whom she had met briefly at her brother’s home during the summer. Momentarily, Eleanor becomes aware of her responsibility as a citizen in relation to the ongoing catastrophe, but only for an instant: “‘Aren’t sailors charming people?’ Celia had said as he opened the door for them. ‘And they dance so beautifully.’” They had

126  “A New Space of Time” in The Years been going up to bed. She looked down at the paper again. It must be him, she supposed. For a second she felt a wish to put out her hand and stop him as he opened the drawing-room door. But how could I have stopped him? She asked herself. She had not stopped him. She saw the gently swaying waves lifting him up and down as he lay helpless in the moonlight. And they had gone upstairs. A sense of futility came over her. But how could I have stopped him? She said aloud. It was absurd (Cs 430, 188). A similar moment occurs to Miriam as she awaits the tube lift in Leicester Square. Earlier she had observed a troop of boisterous young military recruits taking the train as far as Hammersmith. The sight now prompts a glancing insight like Eleanor’s: “Thousands of young men, she thought, are standing in the rain; thousands are lying wounded, she thought, clapping her hands to her skirts. Here the lift opened its door and she hurried in. I’m afraid I’m late, she thought, and perhaps she’ll have gone in” (Cs 425, 183). Miriam’s state of distraction accompanied by a brief glimpse of mass disaster off stage is characteristic of the war mentality that the narration, moving like a film camera, registers as the scene shifts from Richmond to Hammersmith and on to Leicester Square. Whether familiar to the reader or introduced for the first time, the personages of “Wartime London” are caught in a public culture of national mobilization in which individual thought blurs, the ‘correct’ wartime emotions and affects are simulated, and roles adopted or adapted accordingly. Coordinating the whole are the newspaper placards and the headlines of the ubiquitous evening papers on the tube: “People unfolded their newspapers, spreading the sheets wide, so that ‘Three British Cruisers Sunk’ was repeated again and again in large black letters on the front page of one newspaper after another. The newspapers were turned over, as if the readers were searching for more information. But they could find nothing more about the disasters, only items. The wife of a postman at Andover had been brought to bed of triplets; a basket of ripe strawberries had been picked at Sidmouth—that was all” (Cs 423, 181). Only one passenger appears to resist, a middle-aged, respectable “gentleman” with “rather fierce blue eyes.” But his resistance takes the shape of an incipient attack of ‘nerves’: He sat staring at the people in front of him. Since all movement or action was impossible, they were all staring in front of them. There was something in the passive and stolid appearance of the other passengers that seemed to annoy him. He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs. He looked quickly up and down the row of faces. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Since there were five more stations to be passed before he reached his station, and since each station took two minutes to reach, he must sit there for ten minutes longer. The train

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  127 rattled and banged. Whenever he found himself shut up somewhere without anything to do, words seemed to come together in his head. His lips moved. What for, what for, what for, the train seemed to be growling as it rattled through South Kensington station…. Nobody moved or spoke. Everybody seemed to be gloating; to have fed on the garbage in the newspapers; and to be passively chewing the cud. He felt that if this went on he must get up and cry out. Suddenly he caught the reflection of his own face on the glass-lined wall opposite. He saw a red-faced man with a grey moustache staring back at him, quite indistinguishable from the others. (Cs 423–424, 181–182) The conformity, stupor, and distracted attention that Woolf observes in modern mass existence in “Wartime London” help explain why The Years eschews novelistic realism. To have mimed its formulas would have been to repeat the greatest weakness that Woolf perceived in the commercial cinema: namely the simulation of actuality through the visual imitation of a clichéd semiotics of body language and images: “A kiss is love. A smashed chair is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse” (350). Not only film makers but authors, as Woolf argues in “Character and Fiction,” needed to unlearn the old conventions while fashioning new ones. In the Russian fiction that the Woolfs published at the Hogarth Press, she found expressed “the soul” of character missing from Edwardian fiction. 23 Perhaps consciousness might be a better word than “soul” though consciousness pursued with recognition of the fact that words cannot directly express it. Woolf communicates to her readers a sense of this aspect of her characters by means of what she later terms “moments of being” versus “moments of non-being.”24 In The Years, however, such moments acquire a dimension of collective consciousness as well. As Christine Froula has pointed out, violence directed against women both on the public street and at home is a continuing pre-occupation of Woolf in The Years, its unpublished drafts, and related published work. As Woolf continued to write and rewrite the novel, however, the figuration of domestic violence became increasingly oblique. In The Years, for example, sexual harassment experienced by Eleanor’s younger sister, Rose, at an early age is not directly named as it is in The Pargiters. Instead, as had occurred in the writing of Roger Fry, self-censorship on Woolf’s part appears to be in play. Froula at times refers to this process in terms of suppression, at others as a mode of repression.25 The work of repression itself becomes focal within The Years in the following long passage in which Eleanor, wakened by Rose’s cries during a bad dream, wonders whether she should press her sister to tell her what has happened to disturb her. Eleanor as censor eventually decides not to ask,

128  “A New Space of Time” in The Years but Woolf shows how costly such a refusal is and how punishing and self-punishing. Eleanor repeats Rose’s words as she leaves the nursery: “I saw,” Eleanor repeated, as she shut the nursery door. “I saw…” What had she seen? Something horrible, something hidden. But what? There it was, hidden behind her strained eyes. She held the candle slightly slanting in her hand. Three drops of grease fell on the polished skirting before she noticed them. She straightened the candle and walked down the stairs. She listened as she went. There was silence. [Rose’s brother] Martin was asleep. Her mother was asleep. As she passed the doors and went downstairs a weight seemed to descend on her. She paused, looking down into the hall. A blankness came over her. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a heavy frame. What is that? She seemed to be alone in the midst of nothingness; yet must descend, must carry her burden—she raised her arm slightly, as if she were carrying a pitcher, an earthenware pitcher on her head. Again she stopped. The rim of a bowl outlined itself upon her eyeballs, there was water in it; and something yellow. It was the dog’s bowl, she realized; that was the sulphur in the dog’s bowl; the dog was lying curled up at the bottom of the stairs. She stepped carefully over the body of the sleeping dog and went into the drawing-room. (40–41)26 In her account of Rose, Froula sees yet another kind of modernist time at work, namely that of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic time posits an originating moment of trauma that shapes subsequent action. In the case of Rose, Woolf combines such a moment with other moments related to her self-consciousness as a British imperial subject. For Rose, this positioning is axiomatically masculine. In some ways, the most important scene in The Pargiters occurs when a stranger exposes himself to her while she takes an unchaperoned early evening visit to Lamley’s, a toy shop near her home. The incident, knowledge of which is shared with no one but the stranger, shapes Rose’s later history. 27 Froula persuasively links this and other incidents in the novel and its drafts to Woolf’s memory of having been sexually touched as a young girl by an older half-brother. As with Rose, word of this sexual initiation was suppressed, an imposed silencing that Woolf sees as central to the subordination of women inside and outside the bourgeois household. A single traumatic event can function as the cause of the action— or inaction—that ensues. Such is the case with Rose, whose adult life is marked by a sense of indirection, incompletion, and the frustration of her ambitions as both a professional writer and a lover of other women. Froula sees supression at work as well in the increasing obliquity with which this and other sexual transgressions, including possible

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  129 brother-sister incest, are indexed in the published text of The Years. In positing the existence of primal secrets, however, psychoanalysis promises as well their disclosure.28 Woolf associates masculine aggressiveness in Rose with unequal treatment at home in early childhood. Once her older brother Bobby (Martin in The Years) starts school, he uses his new status to bully her. She responds determined to defend her position. Her initiation into male sexual aggression outside the home occurs at age ten, when she is accosted on the street by a male stranger. On the way to Lamleys to buy a box of ducks and swans to play with in her bath (along with a toy battleship), Rose turns her disobedient act into a game. Imagining that she is playing cowboys and indians, “she told herself that she was making preparations for… [a] raid into the enemy’s country” (41). Then she ups the ante: “This was a real adventure… She, the daughter of Colonel Pargiter of Pargiters Horse, was riding by night on a deadly mission through hostile territory…. She carried… [a] secret message which she had to deliver to the English who were besieged in a fortress. Her head was full of her father’s old stories of the Indian Mutiny…. Her horse, she decided, would be shot dead under her just as she reached Lamleys shop. Lamleys was the fortress full of starving English.” When “the figure of a man” unexpectedly emerges from the shadows, she cries to herself, “The enemy—the enemy!” (42). After making her purchase, she starts back home, “having delivered her message to the besieged English, & having cut off the head of the chief rebel.” At this point, the man, awaiting her return, exposes himself, a shock from the suppression of which, as the narrator explains, Rose will never fully recover. Among other things, her expedition to Lamleys becomes a Freudian allegory of the origin of her lesbian sexuality in the beheading of “the chief rebel,” a fantasmatic surrogate for her male competitors and aggressors at home: her brother Martin, and, shadowily behind, her father himself. 29 Violence radiates outwards. For Woolf, it is implicated in gender formation and relations. She also links the debate about the use of violence in civil and political disputes with the struggle for women’s rights. In doing so, she raises uncomfortable questions about connections between female engenderment and public violence—in particular forms motivated by patriotism. In “1911” the reader learns that Rose has been taken to the police court for having thrown a brick through a politician’s window. Once the War begins, however, she, like Radclyffe Hall, the cross-gendered novelist and activist on behalf of civil and social rights for lesbians in the 1920s and 1930s, becomes a fervent patriot. In its proleptic aspects, The Years projects knowledge of future violence from awareness of violence in the past. The London bomb raid of “1917” recalls, so to speak, the expectation of Londoners of the 1930s that drastic air strikes were on the horizon. In “1917” as well as in

130  “A New Space of Time” in The Years “Present Day,” the history of violence and the catastrophes about to overtake Europe’s peoples, especially Jews, both impend. In this way, violence continues to move inward, to diffuse, and to expand. At the same time and in an opposite direction, Eleanor’s conversations with members of her family in both sections recall while continuing to develop further the exploratory work of members of the Post-Impressionist Movement. In both “1917” and “Present Day,” this burden of prophecy is carried by a character outside the Pargiter families, namely Sara’s male homosexual friend, Nicholas Pomjalovsky, an émigré from Poland of whom Eleanor has become fond and to whom she looks for guidance. It is Pomjalovsky’s witness that provides The Years with a double ending. During the party with which the novel ends, Eleanor and a number of other figures seek his guidance as to how, in the words of one of them, “to live differently—differently” (400). Pomjalovsky wishes to respond to the desire of his interlocutors to find “another world, a new world” (401), but both in the 1917 section and at the party, Nicholas finds himself reduced to speechlessness. He is unable to utter what he foresees. Although Pomjalovsky is often associated by critics with any of a number of Russian authors whom Woolf admired,30 a more pertinent reference may be found in the person of “Kot,” S. S. Koteliansky, a celibate male homosexual and pacifist who translated a number of books from the Russian, with assistance at times from the Woolfs. 31 At the turn of the century, Koteliansky was the young scion of a well-to-do Jewish merchant family living in the town of Ostropol within the Pale of Settlement in Russian Ukraine. In his early adulthood, his parents decided to send him to London in order to escape the threat of pogroms at home. During World War II, friends from Ostropol and relatives were executed during the German occupation of Ukraine (Diment 269–270). Pomjalovsky’s stuttering inability to speak in 1937 suggests his awareness of horrors impending in the event of the outbreak of war. At the end of “Present Day,” Eleanor turns to Pomjalovsky in search of a clue as to how to live in the future. As the party ebbs and dawn approaches, however, Woolf, parodies his prophetic moment, which is continually interrupted by others. No single voice, no single answer is sufficient. Instead, the question is answered choricly as Eleanor’s nephew North comes to recognize. A veteran of military action in the War, followed by a long sojourn running a ranch in Africa, North has recently returned to England, probably for good, with the intention of becoming a poet and marrying. When, his sister Peggy, echoing Eleanor, demands of him: “Tell us what we ought to do,” he hesitates, then remembers her injunction earlier in the evening “to live differently” (400). “‘What you said was true,’ he blurted out, ‘…quite true.’ It was what she meant that was true, he corrected himself; her feeling, not her words. He felt her feeling now, it was not about him; it was about other people, about another world, a new world” (401). A similar moment occurs in “1917” despite the fact that the section begins in wartime blackout, and Eleanor and her cousins find their

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  131 evening’s dinner interrupted by a bombing raid. As the sound of bombs recedes, Sara offers a toast: “Well, it’s over now. So let’s drink a health— Here’s to the New World” (277). The phrase is not ironic. The PostImpressionist sense of the advent of a transformation of cultural and social existence survived despite the harsh environment that wartime conditions meant for advanced work in the high and the decorative arts, the invention of new forms of domesticity, and a commitment to pacifism.32 Eleanor turns privately to Pomjalovsky, whom she has just met, to ask his opinion: “About the New World…. D’you think we’re going to improve?” “Yes, Yes,” he said, nodding his head…. “But how…” she began, “…how can we improve ourselves… live more… live more naturally… better… How can we?” It is only a question,” he said—he stopped. He drew himself close to her—“of learning. The soul…” Again he stopped. “Yes—the soul?” she prompted him. “The soul—the whole being,” he explained. He hollowed his hands as if to enclose a circle. “It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form—new combinations?”33 (280) If one wishes to consider the ideological basis of this position, one can find it in Grace Radin’s redaction of Nicholas’s comments in the “1917” section of the holograph ms of The Pargiters. “The nineteenth century was the age of the specialist: The men were educated in one way; to make money; the women in another, to bear children. The result is war… [I’ll] tell you what matters; It is to develop not this faculty which makes money, not that faculty which breeds children; —it is to develop the whole soul, the whole being” (Radin, 71). The soul grows by spreading in rings like those you see in water when a stone has fallen. The only way in which we can educate ourselves at the present moment (when we are so immature—so barbaric, killing ourselves… for a bit of land) is not to impede those rings: to let them spread; when we interrupt the soul & say this is right, not knowing what is right… when we give a prize to the soul—say a peerage, say a don perhaps at Edinboro & Oxford University; and the soul repeats the same rhythm again & again & again: like… the needle of a gramophone which has stuck. (Radin, 71–72) In revising, Woolf deleted statements like these. Transformation could not be effected by words or ideological statements of this sort but only by new modes of self-consciousness and by new forms of relationship not crippled by conventional education.

132  “A New Space of Time” in The Years Hence the importance of the fact that Pomjalovsky, as Eleanor learns in “1917,” is a homosexual. Sara tells Eleanor that Nicholas “ought to be in prison… because he loves… the other sex, the other sex, you see.” In Woolf’s view this difference matters because it makes possible a different—and new—relation between the sexes not only at the level of the two but in relations between more than two individuals. In “1917,” these possibilities are registered even before Eleanor learns of Pomjalovsky’s sexual preference in her curiosity about the relationship between him and Sara, whom she sees to be “in love” with one another (Radin 67). The freedom of this unorthodox tie gives rise to a triangulated relationship among the three. Eleanor and Pomjalovsky become friends while she also becomes attuned to Sara. More, Pomjalovsky directly affects Eleanor, cast in the novel as dutiful daughter, middle-class female philanthropist, and spinster. He enables in her what Stephen Barber refers to as a process of “self-agenting” or what Michel Foucault refers to as rapport á soi.34 “When, she wanted to ask… [Pomjalovsky], when will this New World come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave? He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her.” In its play on the phrase “the other sex,” Sara’s comment converts Pomjalovsky’s sexologically defined “homosexuality” into a queer relationality.35 The Years ends with Eleanor’s question to her brother Morris, “And now?” (412). In terms of time the conjunction indicates sheer seriality— one action after another without the use of conjunctions to indicate causal relations between statements. Time in this sense describes present-future actions as indeterminate. The reference to dawn in the final sentence, subsequently added by Woolf, could signify mere repetition: a daily act recurring yet again. But the poetic lift of the rhetoric suggests something more: “The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace” (412). In a novel shadowed by the advent of World War II, “peace” should be read in its full range of meanings though the specifically interpersonal reference of the term is foremost in Woolf’s mind whether it be in the relation between now elderly brother and sister or between the unknown pair whom Eleanor has just noticed: “She was watching…[a] cab. A young man had got out; he paid the driver. Then a girl in a tweed travelling suit followed him. He fitted his latch-key to the door. ‘There,’ Eleanor murmured, as he opened the door and they stood for a moment on the threshold. ‘There!’ she repeated as the door shut with a little thud behind them” (412). Woolf frequently uses the sight of a young couple exiting or entering a cab in her writing from the late 1920s onward. At the start of the final chapter of A Room of One’s Own, she writes how an unspecified “force” operates on a quiet London street: “Now it was bringing from one side of the street to the other diagonally a girl in patent leather

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  133 boots, and then a young man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window; where the taxi stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they got into the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were swept on by the current elsewhere.” This force is the current of time not directed by the discrete egos that propel individual human beings on their way through the city streets: “At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a complete lull and suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed. A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along.”36 The force provides the temporal medium in which humans, their technology and culture, exist. The sexual drive that brings men and women together in couples belongs to this force. In this respect, the sight of the taxi appears to reaffirm the primacy of the heterosexual couple. But Woolf, in one of the best known passages of the book, moves the image in a different direction so that woman, man, and taxi become a figure of “the unity of the mind” (95), simultaneously feminine and masculine. “One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness. And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female” (96–97). Following Coleridge’s theory of genius, Woolf suggests that “a great mind is androgynous” (97), a capability that she finds expressed in Coleridge’s writing: “When one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of eternal life” (100). The “now” of Eleanor’s question to Morris is the moment in which such births occur. The idea for The Years first came to Woolf on January 20, 1931, when she was completing a paper for delivery to a women’s professional society. She thought of the paper—and the novel—as “a sequel to A Room of One’s Own.”37 At the end of the paper, she imagines her auditors at home in modest apartments but nonetheless, apartments of their own, without a male inhabitant requiring the female tenant’s services. Having celebrated this autonomy, Woolf comments: “That is perhaps enough at the moment. But, then…, what will be the next step? There will have to be one. And I predict that the next step will be a step upon the stair. You will hear somebody coming. You will open the door. And then—this at

134  “A New Space of Time” in The Years least is my guess—there will take place between you and some one else the most interesting, exciting, and important conversation that has ever been heard. But do not be alarmed; I am not going to talk about that now. My time is up.”38 Women’s independence, in Woolf’s prospective view, will produce not monologue or a speech but conversation—among equals. And while the sexuality of the discussants is not subject to exclusions, the talk will be queer; and there will definitely be place for women with sexual and emotional ties with other women, including masculine-style women. “There is a spirit in the house,” Woolf writes, “a very queer spirit—I don’t know how to define it—it is the sort of spirit that is in Dame Ethel Smyth—you have only got to look at her and you will feel it for yourselves—and this spirit… is impossible to lock up—or to lock out.”39 As in the case of Rose in The Years, Smyth, well known as a composer, combined both notoriety for her willingness to be imprisoned in the name of female suffrage and an open sexual interest in other women, including her for a time intimate friend though not lover, Virginia Woolf.40 Woolf’s direction to her readers “to look at her” for themselves focuses attention on Smyth’s assertively masculine style. Woolf is even more explicit in her remarks in a cancelled passage of a typescript of the lecture. Alluding to Smyth, who spoke before her on the program, Woolf writes: “She is of the race of pioneers[, ] she is one of the ice breakers, the gun runners, the window smashers. The armoured tanks, who climbed the rough ground, drew the enemies [sic] fire, and left behind her a pathway… for those who come after her. Thus we honour her… not only for being a musician & a writer, but also for being an armoured tank.”41 The acknowledgment of Smyth’s work as a political activist was especially apropos in context since the event had been organized by the Junior Council of the London and National Society for Women’s Service, a “lively body of young professional women,” in Vera Brittain’s account.42 The organization, of which Lytton Strachey’s sister, Pippa, was a founder, was itself an outgrowth of the suffrage movement. The tendency to see a close relationship between experimental forms of domesticity and the widest horizons of social existence is emphasized, in a negative context, in the reaction of the Woolfs to the suicide of Strachey’s devoted housemate, Dora Carrington, after his death early in 1932. Carrington had lived together with the homosexual Strachey and her husband, Ralph Partridge, at Lytton’s home, Ham Spray. In her diary of May 25, Woolf writes: “A saying of Leonard’s comes into my head in this season of complete inanity and boredom. ‘Things have gone wrong somehow.’ It was the night Carrington killed herself. We were walking along that silent blue street with the scaffolding. I saw all the violence & unreason crossing in the air; ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason.”43 Leonard’s comment refers to the

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  135 failure of the project of individual, interpersonal, artistic, political, and social transformation that had been launched early in the twentieth century to forestall later events such as the Peace Treaty of Versailles along with its consequences.44 Hermione Lee notes that the first comments on Hitler in Woolf’s diary appear in the first weeks after Strachey’s death (620). In the entry for May 25, she protested against “unreason” by asking “Shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order & speed again into my world” (103). In the event, she made two anti-fascist books: The Years and Three Guineas. In the chastened conversations in search of a “New World” that take place in “1917” and “Present Day,” Woolf reprises the aspiration if not the assurance that she shared with others in the years immediately before World War I and continuing against odds thereafter. Moreover, she does not refuse the moments of being that she continues to recognize in daily existence and in her near celibate marriage, queer in its own ways: It is a clear pale blue eyed winters day; &—&—&— my thoughts turn with excitement to The Pargiters, for I long to feel my sails blow out, & to be careering with Elvira [Sara], Maggie & the rest over the whole of human life. And indeed I cannot sum this up, being tired in my head. I think of Lytton too. Yes, of course this autumn has been a tremendous revelation. You will understand that all impediments suddenly dropped off. It was a great season of liberation. Everything appeared very distinct, amazingly exciting. I had no restrictions whatever, & thus was free to define my attitude with vigour & certainty I have never known before…. I secured a season of intoxicating exhilaration. Nor do I intend to let myself pay for it with the usual black despair. I intend to circumvent that supervening ghost—that which always trails its damp wings behind my glories. I shall be very wary, very adept…. To suppress one self & run freely out in joy or laughter with impersonal joys and laughters—such is the perfectly infallible  & simple prescription…. ….If one does not lie back & sum up and & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No; stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L. And say stay this moment. (December 31, 1932)45

Notes 1 See Banfield, The Phantom Table, which I discuss in the preceding chapter. 2 Russell, quoted by Banfield, “Time Passes,” 484. 3 In philosophic terms, Woolf’s approach is phenomenological. Phenomenology addresses “the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the

136  “A New Space of Time” in The Years significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our ‘life-world’” (Smith, “Phenomenology,” 2). See also Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. 4 Woolf, quoted by Banfield, The Phantom Table, 252. 5 Woolf, Moments of Being, 72. 6 In The Sabbath, Abraham Heschell contends that it is in the experience of time that an encounter with God becomes possible, but modernity rejects the existence of time: “Time, being thingless and insubstantial, appears to us as if it had no reality.” Heschell cites as case in point the view of Russell, who writes that time is “an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality… A certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought…. To realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom” (Heschell, The Sabbath, 5, 103 n.2). 7 Banfield, “Tragic Time,” 45. 8 Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 20. Subsequent page references to this work appear within the text. 9 “On or about December 1910 human character changed” (“Character in Fiction,” Essays, 3: 421). 10 Woolf, The Years (2012), 465–466—hereafter cited in the notes as The Years (2012). Woolf “worked for a women’s suffrage organisation” in November, 1910 (462). Subsequent page references to the novel appear in the text.

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  137





21 In Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Grace Radin misdates the section to 1917 (161), but a comment by Eleanor indicates that the actual date is 1914 (The Pargiters, galley proofs, Cs 431, 188.)



































138  “A New Space of Time” in The Years







Bibliography Ahmed. Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. Annan, Noel. Our Age: English Intellectuals between the World Wars—A Group Portrait. New York: Random House, 1990. Baldick, Chris. The Modern Movement. The Oxford English Literary History. Volume 10: 1910–1940. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000. ———. “Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism, and Cambridge Time.” Poetics Today, 24.3 (Fall 2003): 471–516. ———. “Tragic Time: The Problem of the Future in Cambridge Philosophy and To the Lighthouse.” Modernism/Modernity: 7.1 (January 2000)): 43–75. Barber, Stephen. “Lip-Reading: Woolf’s Secret Encounters.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997. Pp. 401–443. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1976. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Ed. Jan van der Dussen. Rev. ed., with Lectures, 1926–1928. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience.” In Virginia Woolf and the Essay, ed. Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Pp. 59–77. Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009. Diment, Galya. A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2011. Dinshaw, Carolyn. “How Soon Is Now?” In How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2012. Ellis, Steve. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. Feigel, Lara. Literature, Cinema and Politics: 1930–1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. “The Psychogenesis of Homosexuality in the Case of a Woman.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Volume 18 (1920–1922). London: The Hogarth Press, 1973. Pp. 147–172. Gere, Cathy. Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago, Press, 2009.

“A New Space of Time” in The Years  139 Graves, Robert, and Alan Hodge. The Long Week End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939. 1940; Reprint. New York: Norton, 1994. Haller, Evelyn. “Her Quill Drawn from the Firebird: Virginia Woolf and the Russian Dancers.” In The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1993. Pp. 180–226. Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. “‘Across the Screen of My Brain’: Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Cinema’ and Film Forums of the Twenties.” In The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1993. Pp. 148–179. ———. “Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin: Selling Out(siders).” In Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000. Pp. 3–35. Heschell, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006. Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2003. Kellman, Steven G. “The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept.” Modern Fiction Studies, 33 (Autumn 1987): 467–477. Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Hamburg: Management Laboratory Press, 2009. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1999. Neverow, Vara. “Historicized Textualities: Resisting Patriarchy.” In Virginia Woolf and Communities. Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis. New York: Pace Univ. Press, 1999. Pp. 65–87. O’Brien. Geoffrey. “The Rapture of the Silents.” New York Review of Books, May 24, 2012, 15–16. Radin, Grace. Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1981. Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999. Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004. Rosen, Charles. “Freedom and Art.” New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012, 28, 39. Smith, David Woodruff. “Phenomenology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of ­Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Southworth, Helen, ed. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2010. Tiessen, Paul. “The Shadow in Caligari: Virginia Woolf and the ‘Materialists’’ Responses to Film.” Film Criticism, 11 (Fall–Winter 1986–1987): 75–83. Vicinus, Martha. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985. ———. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004.

140  “A New Space of Time” in The Years Williams, David. Media, Memory, and the First World War. Montreal: McGill-Quen’s Univ. Press, 2009. Willis, Jr. John H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1992. Woolf, Leonard S. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964. ———. Co-operation and the Future of Industry. London: G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1919. Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1942. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. Volume 4 (1931–1935). New York: Harcout Brace & Company, 1983. ———. Essays. 5 vols. [to date]. London: Hogarth Press, 1986–2009. ———. Moments of Being. Ed. and introd. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd edition. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1985. ———. The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York. The New York Public Library, 1977. ———. Roger Fry: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968. ———. A Room of One’s Own. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York; Harcourt, Inc., 2005. ———. A Writer’s Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1982. ———. The Years. Annotated and introd. Eleanor McNees. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2008. ———. The Years. Ed. Anna Snaith. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,2012. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986.

6

Sexual Politics and Blackout in Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square

As Patrick Deer points out in Culture and Camouflage, the word blackout was used in a variety of contexts in the first half of the twentieth century: theatrical, psychological, military, and political, each of which Patrick Hamilton materializes in his fiction and stagecraft. Rope (1929) begins with the theater stage in disorienting darkness while a murder is being committed. In Gaslight (1944), the recurring dimming of gas lights on stage signifies the “derangement of the senses”1 which the villain of the piece seeks to impose upon his young wife. In the American stage version of the work and in the “delirious score” that Bernard Herrmann wrote for John Brahm’s English film adaptation in 1941, 2 the disordering takes the literal form of excessive drinking.3 The success of George Cukor’s American version in 1944 was followed by a quick succession of Victorian melodramas on screen on both sides of the Atlantic. Among these films is a remake of Hitchcock’s The Lodger, also in 1944, followed a year later by a radically altered adaptation of Hamilton’s 1941 novel, Hangover Square, a psychological thriller with a political edge set in pubs in Earl’s Court. The context was recognized at the time. Richard Winnington, for example, observed that “the book evokes with hatred and truth the atmosphere of a breeding ground of Fascist thugs.”4 The film’s producer, Darryl Zanuck, however, in effect suppressed this context by backdating the action to 1903.5 The novel itself is modernist in structure, alternating in its narrative between periods of tedious normality and textual and psychical breaks into misogynist psychosis. Based in part on middle-class detective fiction, Rope and Gaslight testify to late Victorian influences such as Wilde, Nietzsche, and Nordau, Aestheticism, and the Decadence.6 But Hamilton’s texts, especially Hangover Suare, also have significant connections with modernism, referencing such postWorld War I innovations as Expressionist cinema, European Surrealism, and the popularization of psychoanalysis in Britain.

I. Rope Rope is contemporary in topic, based as it is on the sensational murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy adolescents, in Chicago in 1924.7 Hamilton’s use of a chest

142  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square as a central prop, however, connects the play with “A Wedding Chest” (1904), a late Victorian horror story written by the Decadent Sapphist feminist, Vernon Lee. In Lee’s text, a Renaissance cassone or marriage chest contains the carefully preserved body of a virtuous young woman who was repeatedly raped by an androgynously beautiful but vicious young nobleman. In the story, the young painter-artisan who is the woman’s bereaved fiancé contrives to kill her attacker.8 In Hamilton’s gender switch, the murder victim is not a woman but a good looking and privileged young man killed by two of his acquaintances at Oxford. Since the killers are, in Francois Truffaut ’s phrase, “two young homosexuals,”9 Hamilton’s narrative, unlike Lee’s at first glance, negates male heterosexual prerogative.10 I question below the adequacy of the later restoration of that order by an appeal to the judicial power of the state as well as by the extreme reaction of the young men’s sexually ambiguous older friend, Rupert Cadell, when he recognizes their guilt.11 The two killers profess an immoralist position that calls to mind that of Wilde in his essay, “Pen, Pencil and Poison.” There he remarks that, for contemporary audiences, history’s villains “have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.”12 The subject of Wilde’s essay is Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who in addition to being an artist and journalist proved to be “a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.”13 In his portrait of Wainewright, Wilde links artistic genius, a gift for style, and the cult of beauty with criminality, sexual perversity (Wilde’s Wainewright is connotatively bisexual), and the expression of personality as the supreme artistic value. In Rope, Hamilton’s “puppets” are the two murderers, Wyndham Brandon and Charles Granillo. Although the text of the play specifically associates the idea of aesthetic amorality with Nietzsche not Wilde, Wilde’s paradoxical statements on art and morality were more familiar to Hamilton and his audience than Nietzsche’s. Wilde’s Wainewright provides a model for Brandon while Wilde himself, who became the late-Victorian type of the artist-criminal-sexual pervert as a result of his conviction on charges of gross indecency in 1895, provides a model for Rupert in his insouciant, nonconformist mode. Moments before the curtain rises, Brandon and Granno strangle Ronald Kentley, a young upper-class athlete and fellow student at Oxford. Hidden inside the chest, Kentley’s body remains at center stage for the duration of the play. Brandon and Granno have sacrificed him in an effort to commit the perfect crime, a feat which, if successfully carried out, they—or at least Brandon—believes will demonstrate their superiority to their peers, including the guests whom they have invited for

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  143 supper. These include Kenneth Raglan, a good-looking younger undergraduate who had “fagged” for Brandon at school, and Leila Arden, a young, socially inexperienced woman whom the killers have invited as bait for Kenneth. For good measure, the pair have also invited Ronald’s father, Sir Johnstone Kentley, a gentlemanly patriarch who embodies the powers of convention that the boys see themselves as flouting. Finally, the group includes their mentor and fellow immoralist, the semi-closeted Rupert Cadell, a disabled War veteran still in his twenties. Rupert is a Wildean dandy who has known Brandon since he was a child. He bears a share of responsibility for the crime since it is he who converted Brandon to his advanced views. If Rupert has earlier been a source of moral and social corruption, however, in the dénouement of the play he becomes the murderers’ fiercest critic. Having successfully deduced during the course of the evening that the young men have murdered Ronald and placed the body in the chest, Rupert first leaves, then returns to the apartment, and, going to the window, sends “three piercing whistles into the night” that call to his assistance a policeman whom he has spoken to below. “You are going to hang, you swine!” he cries to the boys. “Hang! – both of you! — hang.”14 Rupert’s vengeful outrage may be due in part to shock, but it also signals guilt and sexual panic. In view of his friendship with Brandon and Granno, one might expect Rupert to react differently, that is, not only in judgment but also in grief. In relation to the murder, two matters come into focus: one is the legitimacy or lack thereof of capital punishment. The other is the brutal fact of the sacrifice of youthful male beauty. Earlier in the play, when murder is being discussed in the abstract, Rupert contends that both middle-class moral opinion and the power of the state lack the moral authority to demand the death penalty. He contrasts this view to the immense injustice inflicted on young soldiers during the War of the preceding decade: You, my friends, [says Rupert to the gathered guests], have, paradoxically, a horror of murder on a small scale, a veneration for it on a large. That is the difference between what we call murder and war. One gentleman murders another in a back alleyway in London for, let us say, … the gold fillings in his teeth, and all society shrieks out for revenge upon the miscreant. They call that murder. But when the entire youth and manhood of a whole nation rises up to slaughter the entire youth and manhood of another, not even for the gold fillings in each other’s teeth, then society condones and applauds the outrage, and calls it war. How, then, can I say that I disapprove of murder, seeing that I have; [sic] in the last Great War, acted on these assumptions myself? A lamentable thing, certainly, and responsible

144  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square for the fact that to-night, instead of being able to fool around the gramophone with… [Kenneth and Leila] —a thing I should very much like to have done—I have to hobble about like an old man, on one leg. (60–61) Later Rupert says to Brandon and Granno: You have taken and killed—by strangulation—a very harmless and helpless fellow-creature of twenty years…. In that chest there—now lie the staring and futile remains of something that four hours ago lived, and laughed, and ran, and found it good. Laughed as you could never laugh, and ran as you could never run…. For your cruel and scheming pleasure, you have committed a sin and a blasphemy against that very life which now [that you have been found out] you yourselves find so precious. And you have done more than this. You have not only killed him; you have rotted the lives of all those to whom he was dear. And you have brought worse than death to his father—an equally harmless old man, … to whom the whole Universe, after this, will now be blackened and distorted beyond the limits of thought. (85; quotation modified) Rupert has responded traumatically to what he sees inside the chest. The sight of the young man’s dead body may prompt the return of memories of horror in battle or trench warfare. Members of the original audiences may also have found that the murder provoked painful memories of wartime losses. Ronald—like Shakespeare’s Banquo—is the guest absented by an untimely death from supper but nonetheless held in mind by the other guests. Grounded in the research of the late Victorian anthropologist, Sir James Frazer, the sacrificial figure of an idealized young man is one of the most pervasive tropes that structure post-War modernist writing in England.15 One finds it in the figure of the Fisher King in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), in the absent figure of Percival in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), and elsewhere. Additionally, the figure has a special valence in writing by subjects of male-male desire at the fin de siècle. In his writing, Walter Pater evokes both the image—and the violent act of execution—in contexts that may be described in twentieth-century terms as homophobic.16 Wilde and A. E. Housman likewise evoke the figure in this spirit. The humanist norm of “life,” in terms of which Rupert condemns the two killers, is the same term on the basis of which subjects of male-male desire condemned those who attacked them.17 In contrast, Rupert’s final long speech brings to mind a view that Lee Edelman sees as characteristic of modern homophobia: namely, the belief

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  145 that sex between men is a mortal offense against the central humanist norm of heterosexual love leading to marriage and reproduction.18 Even Leopold and Loeb, however, escaped the death sentence. Nor is it clear that Rupert’s call for judicial death represents Hamilton’s view of the matter. Execution in the name of justice may be judged to be as much a sin against life as is murder. Moreover, as Rupert has pointed out earlier, the Society whose power over life and death is represented by the hangman is also the Society that licensed Rupert’s wound and the injuries and deaths of millions of other young men in World War I. Rupert’s earlier condemnation of civil execution, which makes equal sense in terms of pacifist rhetoric in England at the time, is not negated by his later words.19 Hamilton’s main psychological interest is in dominance and subordination within individual and group relations. In Rope, the case in point is the homosexual tie that links the two murderers. While Brandon and Granno’s homosexuality is connotative rather than denotative—as it was for Wilde up to the time of the trials—, sexual dominance helps explain the hold that Brandon has on Granno. In addition to the masterslave dynamic, Hamilton also understands the connection between the two murderers in sociological terms as a bizarre effect of the elite public school and university culture in which they have been raised. In part an outcome of the system and in part an act of revolt against it, the young men’s crime entails their racial, classed, and sexual spite. Ronald is a prize-winning athlete, handsome, conventionally heterosexual, and Aryan. He is the true coin of which Brandon is a counterfeit copy. Granillo, for his part, is a hysterical type, mannered, expensively dressed, and “dark,” in Hamilton’s phrase “subject to Anglo-Saxon prejudices” (15). Euphemistically identified in the text as Spanish, Granno likely is of Sephardic Jewish heritage. 20 The necessary secrecy of the pair’s sexual tie has nurtured a sense of criminal apartness from and superiority to women and male heterosexuals. Killing Ronald demonstrates Brandon and Granillo’s resentment, envy, and contempt for a world of normal ties, from which the stigmata of homosexual (and, for Granno, Jewish) exceptionalism permanently excludes them. In addition to Ronald and Brandon, another “fair” (18) young man is Kenneth, whom Brandon has invited to share this bizarre dinner. Brandon condescends to Kenneth as “the most perfect specimen of ordinary humanity obtainable, and therefore a suitable witness to this so extraordinary scene” (14). Late in the play, we not surprisingly learn from Kenneth that Brandon had subjected him to beatings him while both were at school.

II. Gaslight The credit sequence of Gaslight begins not with a blackout but with a dimout as a flaring jet of light in the female protagonist’s bedroom dims.

146  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square This effect occurs as her husband, Anton, searches nightly in the blocked off attic above for the jewels of Alice Alquist, an operatic diva whom Anton murdered in the same house ten years earlier. Subsequently, Anton has courted Alice’s niece, Paula. Like the closed cassone in Rope, the blocked door signals the importance for both Anton and Paula of their latent awareness of an earlier act of violence. Anton’s need to return to the scene of the crime indicates an unconscious wish to accept punishment for his deed. Paula, who was wakened upstairs at the time of the murder, has spent her life attempting to escape this scene of early trauma as well as the pressure applied to her by her mentors to retrace the steps of her aunt’s career. The action of the play, however, will force her to confront this obscene version of the primal scene. In the manner of Forties thrillers cast in a Freudian mold, being forced to confront this memory holds out the possibility that she may be able to recover normalcy in the arms of the detective who rescues her from her husband’s designs. It should be kept in mind, however, that Inspector Cameron (played by Joseph Cotten) has also been fixated on Alice Alquist since childhood. Psychological blackouts are to the fore in the play. For example, Anton (named Manningham in Angel Street, the play on which the film is based) attempts to drive his wife insane by claiming that she unconsciously hides household objects and personal possessions such as his pocket watch. Both the housekeeper Elizabeth and Mrs. Manningham suspect her husband’s intentions, but Paula is forced to suppress her rising suspicion and terror. Were she to do otherwise, her very suspicion might be claimed by Anton as evidence of mental instability and therefore as grounds for committing her to an asylum. The imbalance of legal power in the relation between husband and wife in Victorian law enables Anton to subject his wife to sadistic torment. In the film version, however, Paula’s implicit masochism makes her a complicit victim. Later in this chapter, I will consider the unconscious trauma that Anton repetitively re-enacts in his own behavior. The film, however, focuses on his wife’s trauma. In the stage version, Mrs. Manningham is unrelated to her husband’s murder victim. In the film, following the crime Paula is led from the house by her aunt’s lawyer. Preventing the girl from looking back, he advises her to forget what she has seen. The action then shifts to Italy a decade later where, now a beautiful young woman, Paula is in the middle of a music lesson in which she sings an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor. The female protagonist of this work is Italian opera’s possibly most familiar madwoman. Paula’s guardian and instructor, Maestro Guardi, complains that she is not concentrating—at which point she admits to being distracted by a new romance—a tradeoff that clearly signals her wish to substitute life as a wife in preference to following in her aunt’s footsteps. Guardi makes a mistake in giving Paula his blessing without first learning whom her lover may be. In fact, her lover is her new accompanist,

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  147 Gregory Anton. How he has managed to acquire this position, we do not know. We do know, however, that the engaged pair have known each other for only two weeks. Anton, played by Charles Boyer, is eager to marry at once; but Paula, who says she needs time to think, delays by leaving for a brief stay in northern Italy’s lake country. Upon arriving at Como, however, she learns that Anton has preceded her. Ominously, before she sees him, his hand reaches into the film frame and takes hold of her arm as she departs the train. Paula, however, chooses to ignore this violation of her physical and psychical space. Later, when the couple discuss where they will live after their marriage, Anton describes a house in a London square exactly like the one that Paula left years earlier. At this point, a less troubled woman might well wonder whether Anton has not been looking into her property; but, hoping through love to escape the burden of the past, she accommodates herself to his wishes. Paula’s behavior on the night of the murder suggests a child’s curiosity about what goes on when her parents are in their bedroom. What she discovered that night, however, was not sex but her aunt’s corpse. As an adult, she unconsciously contrives to return to the scene of the crime as the wife of the murderer. In this scenario, sexual consummation and the threat of personal annihilation are once again linked. In another register, desire takes the form of romantic masochism, which will be converted into terror as Paula’s psychopathic partner plots to repeat the extinction of the aunt in the social extinction—i.e., the blackout—of her niece by having her committed to an asylum. When, following their marriage, Paula and Anton arrive at her house in London, her troubled memory is at once activated. Attempting to suppress her own affect and emotion, she ignores her husband’s seeming obliviousness to the extent of her discomfort. Once in the house, however, she quickly discovers a letter bearing the name of Sergius Bauer, her aunt’s murderer. Anton, who has changed his name, seizes the letter but, instead of destroying it, hides it in his writing desk. Later, when Cameron is on the scene, Paula comes across the letter and gives it to him. Again Anton’s behavior implies a wish that the truth of his guilt be revealed. And note that it is not Cameron but Paula, unconsciously already suspecting her husband, who immediately discovers the incriminating evidence that she later shares with Cotten. Central in Hamilton’s imaginary is the sadomasochistic transfer of power from one individual to another or from the members of a collective to their charismatic leader. Like Freud, Hamilton sees this perversion to be basic to individual psychology, to the psychology of the couple, and to group psychology, especially fascist. Following World War II, as his physical, emotional, and intellectual capabilities were undercut by worsening alcoholism, Hamilton’s obsession with sadomasochism pulled him downward. On the domestic front, the compulsion is evident in the triangulated relationship that he formed on the one hand

148  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square with his wife, Lois, who continued to serve his need for a long-suffering wife/mother, as well as with La, the high strung aristocratic mistress who shared his taste for rough sex and who later became his second wife (Jones, 307–354). Sadomasochistic play also figures in Hamilton’s fiction of the following decade, especially the Gorse trilogy. Of Ernest Ralph Gorse, Hamilton writes: [Sexually] he was mostly stimulated by what is (on the whole foolishly) known as a perversion. He liked to tie women up in order to get the impression that they were at his mercy, and he also liked to be tied up by women and to feel that he was at theirs. It is foolish to call this a perversion because, as every serious student of the general psychology of sex (who would be supported by any prostitute, or keeper or frequenter of brothels) knows, it is merely a rather emphasized form of the sadistic or masochistic element underlying every physical relationship between man and woman or, if it comes to that, man and man, or woman and woman. (Cited in Jones 352) The narrator objects to Gorse’s behavior not on moral but on aesthetic grounds. What makes it “objectionable was the highly distasteful way he indulged it” (352). Hamilton is, however, being euphemistic. Gorse, it turns out, is another sexual psychopath, whose story is based on that of Neville George Clevely Heath, a con-man and killer who in 1946 was arrested on charges of murder arising from brutal sex crimes against two women (Jones 320–321). Hamilton’s multivalent interest in sadomasochism is evident in the twist ending of Gaslight. At the end of the film, Cameron traps Anton in the attic where he has finally found the missing jewels, then ties him securely to a chair while he awaits the arrival of the police. After Paula asks to be left alone with her husband, a sadomasochistic reversal occurs. Anton, in a desperate attempt to regain control, directs his wife’s attention to a knife, which he begs her to use to cut his ropes so that he may escape through a skylight. Instead, pretending to be mad, she takes the knife, which she claims to be unaware that she is holding, and approaches Anton in a threatening manner. Now at last, she can express the rage and contempt that occasionally flash in her eyes at earlier points in the film. However she chooses to take her revenge playfully by pretending to give way to a homicidal urge. The scene draws viewers of the film into its psychological dynamic. As in other examples of the thriller such as Marie Belloc Lowndes’s adaptation of the Jack the Ripper sensation to early twentieth-century London in her novel, The Lodger, the suspense of the work depends upon the viewer’s sharing in the growing apprehension and suspicion of

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  149 Mrs. Bunting, the film’s leading protagonist, a landlady who finds herself led into a growing conviction that her new lodger is in fact a serial killer. Like Paula, however, Bunting is constrained from taking protective action or sharing her concern with others. Only at the end of the film is Paula permitted catharsis—and the viewer along with her. In Gaslight, catharsis means the opportunity for members of the audience to participate in Paula’s moment of sadistic triumph. Sigmund Freud, with whose work Hamilton was familiar, explicitly links the psychology of the individual with group psychology in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922).21 For both writers, the implicit context is that of the perceived failure of the norm of liberal individualism. Freud explains the psychology of the relationship between an authoritarian leader and his followers by analogy with the psychical structure of the I. For Freud, the leader of the group occupies a position of potentially punishing authority similar to that of the ego ideal in relation to the ego within the individual psyche.22 In fascist politics, the authority of the leader comes to substitute for an individual’s internalized ego ideal. In a further analogy developed in detail later in the text, this relation resembles that of a hypnotist to his subject. It is because of the authority ceded to the hypnotist that he holds sway, to a degree, over the subject. Both Gustave Le Bon, against whose book, Psychologie des foules, Freud argues, and Slavoj Ẑiẑek speak of “a thirst for obedience” as providing the jouissance of the fascist subject. 23 “Let us take the case of Fascism,” Ẑiẑek remarks: Fascist ideology is based upon a purely formal imperative: Obey, because you must. In other words, renounce enjoyment, sacrifice yourself and do not ask about the meaning of it…. It is this renunciation, this giving up of enjoyment itself, which produces a certain surplus-enjoyment.... For Fascist ideology, the point is not the instrumental value of the sacrifice, it is the very form of sacrifice itself, ‘the spirit of sacrifice,’ which is the cure against the liberal-decadent disease. It is also clear why Fascism was so terrified by psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis enables us to locate an obscene enjoyment in this act of formal sacrifice.24 Freud writes: “the hypnotist awakens in the subject… the idea of a paramount and dangerous personality, towards whom only a passivemasochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered” (76). This idea, which Freud calls “archaic,” he associates with the relation to the father in the Oedipus complex (46) but more so to Freud’s anthropological myth, derived from Darwin, of the relation between sons and father within the primal horde. “The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed

150  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority…. The primal father is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal” (76). To this point, Freud is speaking in terms of a group bonded by male homosocial desire. The fantasy of power and sacrifice that structures Hamilton’s play, Rope, similarly is one of male homosocial desire. Introducing the concept of the couple, however, Freud is in position to introduce another analogy as well, that between male and female in opposite-sex desire (57–58). “Hypnosis has a good claim to being described as a group of two” (76). In this way, Freud reduces the role of charisma in mass psychology to one of desire between two members of a couple. The desire for the leader “is not based upon perception and reasoning but upon an erotic tie” (77). In the terms of the nineteenth-century experts on group psychology whose work Freud summarizes in the first half of Group Psychology, the power of “suggestion” in this relation can be thought of in “magnetic” or mesmeric terms (18). Freud’s modern contribution is to specify the tie as specifically erotic. Two trains of thought link the hypnotist and his subject with Hamilton’s work. In terms of the genres in which he writes—the thriller, murder mystery, horror story, melodrama, and detective story—the power of one subject over another is a source of both terror and psychological contagion. An archetypal example of this situation occurs in the silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which the male protagonist fantasizes that Dr. Caligari controls a somnambulist who performs serial killings at Caligari’s direction. 25 In the immediate postWorld War II period, Siegfried Kracauer argued that “Caligari is a very specific premonition … of Hitler.”26 The other direction of the analogy is toward the pattern of domination (usually male) and subordination (usually female) that exists in the heterosexual couple. Hamilton uses the conventions of Victorian melodrama in order to pursue a specific line of thought. In this view, Gaslight does not only describe an abusive relation within what Virginia Woolf calls Victorian patriarchy, it also provides an example of the sadomasochistic dynamics of the heterosexual couple. This example may in turn be abstracted in order to refer to an imbalance of power within other dyads, including that between the crowd and its leader. In this way, Hamilton reverses the dynamic of Freud’s text, which moves from an analysis of the crowd to an analysis of the couple. By analogy with the psychical structure of the heterosexual couple, in Gaslight Hamilton explores the psychological structure of domination and dependence in fascism. In Hangover Square, he proceeds to explore its sociology. Both aspects converge in Netta Longdon, the focal point of the male protagonist’s erotic obsession.

III. Hangover Square The action of Hangover Square begins on Christmas Day. In Western tradition, of course, the day of the birth of Christ was understood to begin a

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  151 new age in human history, one of new life, hope, and redemption, so much so that, for centuries, calendar time was divided between years B.C., i.e., “Before Christ,” and those afterwards, A.D., in Anno Domini (“In the year of the Lord”). This conception of temporality as sacred could not be further from the experience of time in Hamilton’s novel. The England in which Hangover Square is set exists outside the bounds of validation not only of sacred history but also of British imperial history as a result of Prime Minister Chamberlain’s decision to sign the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, which acquiesced in Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Hamilton’s novel protests the betrayal of human values explicit in this action. The events of the novel take place for the most part in 1939, i.e., between the date of the pact and Germany’s subsequent invasion of Poland on September 1, l939, as a result of which Great Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. During the following eight months, often referred to as the Phoney War, Allied military action was limited for the most part to naval and air engagements. Large-scale bombardment of London did not begin until September, 1940, continuing thereafter until May, 1941. This sequence includes the action of Hamilton’s novel, which ends with a murder-suicide on September 3 and 4, 1939. Hamilton also wrote the novel between these dates, beginning on Christmas day, 1939, and ending in February, 1941. Unlike the characters of the novel, when it first appeared in 1941, its readers would have been familiar with this entire sequence as well as the events of the following two years. The experience of the novel exists in a queasy space of boredom, distraction, uncanny calm, and ultimate sudden violence. This aporia corresponds with while marking the end of the perception of British Imperial time as stasis that I earlier associated with Maugham’s South Seas tales and Orwell’s Burmese Days. In the months following the Munich Agreement, Hamilton satirized this sort of temporality in a dystopian fantasy of life in Britain entitled Impromptu in Moribundia (1939). The conceit of the text is that the narrator’s newfound land is an exact duplicate of the England that he has left behind. This new place, however, is England not as it is but as it would be were its ideological and commercial self-representation not fictive but actual. Hamilton tells his reader all that s/he needs to know about this alternative reality when the narrator visits a gentleman’s club to find out what the inhabitants of Moribundia read. To his surprise, he finds that the authors of literary modernism are unknown while “the three great names” of contemporary Moribundian literature continue to be Edwardians: Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Newbolt, and John Buchan.27 The narrator remarks that the defining feature of Moribundia is the characteristic of “Unchange.”28 Hamilton occupies the time between Munich and the U.K.’s declaration of war against Germany with the unfolding of what would become

152  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square a standard noir plot, focusing on George Harvey Bone, a haplessly romantic male protagonist, foredoomed to failure, and Netta Longdon, his seductive nemesis. Both experience violent ends at the end of the novel. During the months of the Phoney War and the London Blitz, Hamilton like Orwell and others on the Left experienced a strong sense of fellowship with working-class Britons. Both men anticipated a transformation of working-class consciousness during and immediately after the War, which they believed would lead to a Socialist or Communist revolution and with it the formation of a new social and political order, possibly democratic but more likely to be on the Soviet Russian model.29 Hamilton’s biographer, Nigel Jones, believes that the deaths that occur at the end of the novel, including that of Longdon’s sometime lover, “the blond fascist” Peter, 30 figure the fate in such circumstances of members of the retrograde petty bourgeoisie (Jones, 247). In view, however, of the louche life that Netta and the others live in Earl’s Court pubs and rooming houses, they might more properly be regarded as members of the lumpenproletariat, demoralized and often criminal members of the lower class.31 George’s condition echoes Hamilton’s sense of being in a state of “limbo” (Jones 238) between autumn, 1938, and spring, 1940. The opening pages of the novel, which are written from George’s point of view, record his sense of his present existence as “dead” (16). Since early childhood, he has been stigmatized as a result of cognitive breaks that leave him dazed, spent, and unaware of what happens during them. At the start of the novel, these states are increasing in intensity and frequency. During them, he experiences “in fact, no sensation, no pleasure or pain at all in the world: there was only himself—his dreary, numbed, dead self” (17). Hamilton internalizes this condition in the structure of the novel, which is divided into two distinct but interleaved narratives. The first, in third-person singular indirect discourse, records George’s dissociated states, in which his objective is an action, namely “to kill Netta Longdon” (18), of which he is unaware in his normal state. When not in a fugue state, George is unaware that he is drifting toward homicide. Even in a ‘normal’ state, however, his emotional response to Netta’s behavior is implicitly violent. In other words, the plot and the action toward which it tends are thoroughly misogynist.32 The formal division of the text mirrors George’s split consciousness.33 The second narrative, also in the third person, expresses his awareness during his ordinary unemployed, day-to-day existence. The uneventful monotony of this existence is punctuated by bouts of alcoholic intoxication, which may be thought of as attempts to relieve the anxiety that characterizes both states. Despite the fact that in his normal condition George is unaware of his murderous intention, he recognizes that he hates Netta—although the word hatred here is likely metaphorical, referring to a complex emotional state characterized by the rage and

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  153 resentment to which George gives internal voice. At the least, this internal awareness indicates that George shares the insight of a contemporary psychoanalyst such as Klein that the acculturated ego includes psychotic elements.34 Form and content work together to declare the modernism of Hamilton’s project: which relies on insights that call to mind both Kleinian psychoanalysis and Freudian metapsychology; the interruption of narrative continuity; and a paradoxical reliance on the portrayal of extreme mental states in order to produce a sense of coherence. These states are punctuated in turn by moments of rupture, which George experiences as a “click,” “snap,” “crack” or even, most extremely, by instants of silence, “the sound which a noise makes when it abruptly ceases” (15). At the same time, as a popular writer, Hamilton skillfully manages these shifts in order to enable the reader to navigate the split text without difficulty. Like the protagonists of Burmese Days and Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, George’s egocentric fantasy of life together with Netta takes the form of a sentimental pastoral idyll: “He wanted a cottage in the country—yes, a good old cottage in the country—and he wanted Netta as his wife. No Children. Just Netta—and to live with her happily and quietly ever afterwards. He would love her, physically love her, even when she was old. He was certain of that, though sophistication [meaning the pub crowd] condemned the idea as absurd. She was, to him, so utterly different from any other girl that the thought of tiring of her physically was unimaginable” (32). Thus George—in spite of the fact that he already fully recognizes that he is caught in a no-win situation: Netta. Nets. Netta. A perfectly commonplace name. In fact, if it did not happen to belong to her, and if he did not happen to adore her, a dull, if not rather stupid and revolting name. Entirely unromantic— spinsterish, mean—like Ethel, or Minnie. But because it was hers look what had gone and happened to it! He could not utter it, whisper it, think of it without intoxication, without dizziness, without anguish. It was incredibly, inconceivable lovely—as incredibly and inconceivably lovely as herself. It was unthinkable that she could have been called anything else. It was loaded, overloaded, with voluptuous yet subtle intimations of her personality. Netta. The tangled net of her hair—the dark net—the brunette. The net in which he was caught—netted. Nettles. The wicked poison-nettles from which had been brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles…. To nestle. To nestle against her. Rest. Breast. In her net. Netta (31). Netta is the “breast,” a fantasized source of both nourishment and sexual satisfaction, necessary to the survival of the male subject. The passage, however, overflows with masculine resentment of George’s

154  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square dependence on his love-object. Her nettles are “poison,” his attraction to her a “net” of emasculating imprisonment. Like the protagonist of Milton’s poem, Samson Agonistes, from which Hamilton draws epigraphs for a number of sections of the novel. George is rendered helpless by the wiles of a beautiful and treacherous woman. Even when he is in his normal state, he recognizes the antagonism that his dependence on this “breast” provokes. “He hated Netta…. The fact that he was crazy about her physically, that he worshipped the ground she trod on and the air she breathed, that he could think of nothing else in the world all day long, had nothing to do with the underlying stream of scorn he bore towards her as a character. You might say he wasn’t really ‘in love’ with her: he was ‘in hate’ with her. It was the same thing—just looking at his obsession from the other side. He was netted in hate just as he was netted in love. Netta: Netta: Netta…. God—how he loved her!” (33) Netta is a beautiful woman, unattracted to work, who would prefer to sleep her way to the top rather than to attempt to master her craft as an actor. The social set to which she attaches herself in downscale Earl’s Court pubs is similarly indolent. George’s negativity extends to include the members of this group, especially Peter. He and the rest, abetted by Netta, condescend to George, in reality because they resent his modest financial independence, which they lack: “Drunken, lazy, impecunious, neurotic, arrogant, pub-crawling cheap lot of swine—that was what they all were. Including him and Netta. She was an awful little drunk, though she had a marvelous head. She never got up till half-past twelve: just chain-smoked in bed till it was time to drop over and into the nearest pub (only she had to have a man to take her over, because she didn’t want to be taken for a prostitute). And she was the daughter of a clergyman in Somerset. Now deceased!” (33). At the end of the chapter, George suddenly associates Netta’s circle with the members of Britain’s ruling class, whom they envy: He knew that Munich was a phoney business. Fine for an Earls Court binge, but a phoney business, however much you talked. Shame, that was all he had felt, shame which he couldn’t analyse. He had felt it all the time they were getting drunk—in fact he had hardly been able to drink at all himself. He was so ashamed he could hardly look at the pictures [in the press] … All grinning, shaking hands, frockcoats, top-hats, uniforms, car-rides, cheers—it was like a sort of super-fascist wedding or christening. (Peter, of course, was a fascist, or had been at one time—used to go about Chelsea in a uniform.) And then home again, newsreels, balconies, “I think it is peace in our time.” Mrs. Chamberlain the first lady of the land… He was ashamed then, and he was still ashamed. (36)

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  155 George associates the indignity and false consciousness of Earl’s Court pub life with the decadence of the members of the Tory elite who had signed the Munich Agreement three months earlier. They share in the “shame” (36) of the drinkers who have taken comfort in the settlement, a shame that George in his feckless existence shares although in fact he knows better. At the end of the chapter, he sees “a blotchy yellow reflection of himself” (36) in the steam collected on the inside of the window of the railway carriage that carries him back to London. A moment before, he had wondered—even half hoped—that if and when the War comes, he may find himself released from his current state into a life of action (35). But the yellow reflection ironically reminds both him and Hamilton’s readers of the mustard gas that caused so many British casualties during World War I. Hamilton’s text provides a context for George’s sexual neediness in the narrator’s account of George’s experiences at an inferior public school, where, on account of his recurrent ‘spells,’ he was regarded as queer by both students and tutors.35 At school too, however, George first experienced the form of intimacy that he most values, namely male “friendship” (115). When he casually runs into John Littlejohn, a rare good friend from those days, in a pub, George is overcome with emotion. Near the end of the novel, his tenderness turns instantaneously into rage when he mistakenly concludes that Netta has reneged on a promised trip with him to Brighton in order to attend an opening there with John instead. Phantasmatically, George immediately converts John and himself into romantic rivals for Netta. However, George fears that he cannot compete with John, an accountant for the company of theatrical agents and producers with one of whose principals, Eddie Carstairs, Netta is attempting to connect. After leaving school, George and John remained in frequent contact along with another graduate, Bob Barton. When Bob took George on as his business partner, the effect was transformative: George became “a different person, with more poise, confidence, alertness” (113). The relationship came to an end, however, when their joint “enterprises” failed, and Bob left for the United States. “Looking at George now, and the signs of drink, smoking, misery and loneliness which showed so plainly on his face and bearing, it struck John Littlejohn that Bob had unwittingly done George a very bad service, indeed a permanent damage perhaps, by going to America like that” (115). At the end of Part 5, the narrator returns to the topic of contemporary fascism, another habitus of male homosciality. Hamilton links Nazism with heterosexual sex in the form of the casual affair in which Netta and Peter are involved. Their attraction to fascism in both its German and its Italian manifestations is mingled with the pair’s disavowed social snobbery. Moreover, Netta loves the theatrical effects upon which both regimes depend: “She was supposed to dislike fascism, to laugh at it, but

156  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square actually she liked it enormously. In secret she liked pictures of marching, regimented men, in secret she was physically attracted by Hitler; she did not really think that Mussolini looked like a funny burglar. She liked the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots, the swastikas, the shirts. She was, probably, sexually stimulated by these things in the same way as she might have been sexually stimulated by a bull-fight. And somehow she was dimly aware of the class content of all this: she connected it with her own secret social aspirations and she would have liked to have seen something of the same sort of thing in this country” (153–154). The mix of violence and sadism in Netta’s pleasure connects with a sadomasochistic reading of opposite-sex desire. The fascination with spectacle, which offers a pre-echo of postmodern accounts of fascist display, connects with Netta’s sense of herself as a future screen goddess.36 Transformed into spectacle, she can imagine the worship—and offerings— that she will receive from players in the male-dominated worlds of West End theater and the British film industry. In film as an aesthetic or work environment, however, she has no interest. When George introduces her to Johnnie in Part 4, he sees in her a familiar theatrical type: The girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purposes…. [Women like Netta] were like bad-tempered street-walkers, without walking the street. They walked, instead, the offices of inferior film agencies and studios, and they sat in dirty snack bars with tall, pimply young men, and they went about in open sports cars and they lived in the suburbs, or in Maida Vale, or Earl’s Court. They had not the smallest talent for the theatre, nor the slightest interest in it save as a dubious means to a dubious end. (122) Experienced in the worlds of stage and screen, Hamilton was aware of its gendered dichotomies in ways of which Netta is ignorant. While that world actually holds out little prospect for her, however, Hamilton makes clear that, for its successful male practitioners, sociality within the film industry can offer genuine comradeship, albeit well-oiled by drink. Utopia is male. The action of Part 10, “Brighton,” turns on a betrayal. Netta borrows money from George after agreeing to accompany him to the opening of a new play there. On the day of the performance, however, she cancels the date, supposedly because of a family emergency. In fact, however, she has arranged to drive down with “little Johnnie” in hopes of a chance to socialize with Eddie. Things go awry, however, after George,

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  157 now drunk, decides to proceed to Brighton without her. Once at the theater, he is surprised to see her there, sharing a drink with Johnnie, Eddie, and others. George immediately jumps to the conclusion that Netta and Johnnie have played a trick on him but soon learns that Johnnie had agreed to drive Netta to Brighton only as a favor to George. Once the men are free of Netta, they leave for another venue where Johnnie introduces George to Eddie and the two comic stars of the play. Aware of how intoxicated and unstrung George is, the men enfold him in the warm welcome of a genuine comradeship. Overcome with emotion, he sees himself as having now succeeded in outbidding Netta’s desire for Eddie’s attention. The sense is confirmed by the consensus, shared between the three men, that Netta is a “bitch” (300). After the men return George, yet more drunk, to his place of lodging, he is ecstatic: They liked him—not her! Johnnie was his friend, not hers, and Eddie Carstairs, the famous Eddie Carstairs of Fitzgerald, Carstairs and Scott, had given him some advice! Oh, God—they were so kind—they weren’t like Netta and Peter—they were kind! They were the high-ups, they were the stars (whom Netta and Peter schemed to meet), and they were kind! Netta and Peter were not kind: they were the low-downs and harsh and cruel. But he had won after all, and he was right after all, and Johnnie had done it for him—old Bob Barton Johnnie!—and Johnnie was his friend! Oh, God—they had been kind at last to him: at last they had been kind! (311) The advice that Eddie has given him as to how to deal with women like Netta is inadvertently ominous: “There’s only one thing that’s any good with a certain type of woman, you know,” says Eddie. “Ask her for what you want, ask her whether she means to give it to you, and if she doesn’t, throw her out of the window.” The narrator adds: “They all… laughed at this, because, among other things, he did not use those exact words, but more vulgar, vivid, and racy ones” (310). The comradeship that George experiences in Brighton is real. But it depends on shared alcoholic intoxication and the abasement of women’s threatening sexuality. Despite his sweetness of temperament, he is steeped in this antagonism, which Hamilton makes clear from the very beginning of the novel. There the misogynistic meditation on Netta’s name is triggered when George notices a woman whom he hasn’t seen before standing on the railway platform as he leaves his aunt’s home on Boxing Day. The “woman on the platform wore no hat, in spite of the cold; but instead of that she wore a hair-net over her hair. He looked at this hair-net with dull misery in his heart. Even after the train had

158  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square started, and the woman had vanished, he retained a picture of the hairnet, and wondered why it made him miserable, why he hated the woman for wearing it, why he obscurely felt she had been giving him cause for resentment” (30). George is now ready for the final act in Part 11, “Maidenhead.” Back in London the following day, he quickly dispatches both Netta and Peter, the latter with a well-aimed seven iron. While arranging Netta’s flat as he wishes the police to find it, George turns on the wireless. It is September 3, 1939. He hears Prime Minister Chamberlain delivering the declaration of war against Germany, parts of which Hamilton at this point quotes. George then makes his way to Maidenhead, the Thameside town that in Part I he had pledged to visit following Netta’s death. There he anticipates finding both “peace” (18) and freedom from the pursuing “police” (19). Once there, he commits suicide by gas, another oblique allusion to events likely to take place in the coming War. While this foreordained ending is bleak, the novel also gestures toward the oncoming war as potentially transformative, a hope that Hamilton, Orwell, and others held between 1938 and 1941. Returning from Hunstanton to London on Boxing Day, 1938, George had speculated: “What if a war was what he was waiting for? That might put a stop to it all. They might get him—he might be conscripted away from drinks, and smokes, and Netta. At times he could find it in in his heart to hope for a war—bloody business as it all was” (35). In 1945, the final year of World War II, Twentieth-Century Fox released a film adaptation of Hangover Square in order to capitalize on the studio’s recent successful remake of Hitchcock’s The Lodger. The critical and commercial success of Gaslight likewise provided a prompt. Laird Cregar, who had starred in the remake of The Lodger, was urging the studio to adapt Hamilton’s novel. In the completed script, however, the action of the novel is transferred in time from the recent past to London in 1899, near the end of Victoria’s reign. George continues to be subject to bouts of amnesia, and his attraction to Netta is tortuous. But he is now portrayed as a talented late Victorian pianist and promising young composer in the vein of Rachmaninoff. George finds it difficult to choose between the chaste and beautiful upper-class young woman who loves him and plans to foster his career and Netta, a successful music hall performer who treats him with contempt. The Victorian setting functions as a way of divorcing the film’s plot and characterizations from both modern psychology and social and political analysis. In particular, Hamilton’s damning portrayal of the Establishment in the face of Hitler’s expansionary foreign policy is excluded from Barré Lyndon’s script, an elision perhaps welcome in 1945 when Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States were leading the Allies in their successful effort to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  159

Notes 1 The phrase is that of the young left-wing writer of fiction, Edward Upward (Statement, 9), who here echoes Arthur Rimbaud. 2 Barefoot, Gaslight Melodrama, 47. 3 Hamilton suffered from alcoholism. 4 Cited in Barefoot, 46. Similarly, in Journey to the Border (1938), Upward imagines the existence of a group of young upper-class Fascists who together offer the Nazi salute as they await the arrival of a “a Fascist leader” in a marquee at a provincial race course (Statement, 15). 5 Barefoot, 46–47, 54–55, 187. 6 Nordau, Degeneration. Nordau argued that the stresses of modern urban existence produced nervous disorders. Leopold and Loeb’s attorney for the defense, Clarence Darrow, adopted this view in defending them against a possible death penalty. Regarding Loeb, Darrow asserted: “I know that one of two things happened to this boy; that this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor, or that it came through his education and his training after he was born…. There is not a biologist in the world who will not say I am right” (Baatz, For the Thrill of It, 374). 7 Hamilton denied a connection between the action of his play and the recent murder case, but the similarities are obvious (Jones, Through a Glass Darkly, 163–165). For more on the case, see Baatz; Higdon, The Crime of the Century; and Linder, “The Leopold and Loeb Trial.” 8 Lee, “A Wedding Chest,” in Hauntings, 229–242. See also Vicinus, “The Adolescent Boy,” 96, and Pulham, “Colouring the Past.” 9 Quoted by Miller, “Anal Rope,” 121. Laurents, wrote the script of the film version at a time when he and Farley Granger were lovers. Granger played the role of Granno, Anglicized as Phillip Morgan. Granger, John Dall (who played Brandon Shaw), Hitchcock, and Laurents understood all three principal male roles to be homosexual, with Brandon and Granno currently lovers and Cadell likely a former lover of Brandon (Laurents 115, 130). D. A. Miller’s is the best-known gay reading of the film. In a later study, he offers a formalist reading of the gaze that emphasizes Hitchcock’s pleasure in “kink” (Laurents, 130; Miller, Hidden Hitchcock, 55–92).





160  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square































Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  161 definitions of mental illness (779n. 6, 781n. 58, 783n. 110). For his part, Hamilton focuses not on medical diagnosis but on the existential situations that arise from the split. 34 Rose, Why War?, 147. See also Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation”; Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive, 57; and Overy, The Morbid Age, 136–174. 35 In Anglophone countries in the early 1990s, among many sexual activists the word queer became a preferential option as the name for a particular contemporary sexual identity. Prior to that, however, it already had a wide range of meanings, among them the connotation and/or denotation of sexual perversity. In this sentence, I use it in the sense of “irregular” or “uncanny.” For more, see Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds, 44, 198n. 46. 36 “In elaborating its modern identity… [the Fascist] regime both opposed and drew upon commodity culture, with its intersection of display and desire, of the attraction of aesthetics and the aesthetics of attraction, of visual pleasure and the pleasure of vision. Indeed, whereas fascism’s discourse of corporativism offered a representational countermeasure to decadent capitalism, the spectacle of fascist politics proposed a countermodel to… commercial spectacle and coexisted with consumption. But in the totalitarian politics of fascism, there was only one focus of desire, only one object of pleasure: the regime, anthropomorphically embodied in the public persona of the Duce, Mussolini. Living in a different constellation than film actors did, but still a star, Mussolini attracted interest and admiration; he projected aura and awe. And the regime seemed to count on the spectacular nature of his political trajectory in order to satisfy the consuming needs of the population” (Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 144–145).

Bibliography Allfrey, Anthony. Edward VII and His Jewish Court. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991. Baatz, Simon. The Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago. NewYork: Harper, 2009. Barefoot, Guy. Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 2001. Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992. Dellamora, Richard. Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ———. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997. Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Ed. Robert Fraser. A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: Jonathan Cape, 1930. Reprint. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2011.

162  Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square ———. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Introd. Peter Gay. New York: Norton & Co., 1989. Grosskurth, Phyllis. Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994. Hamilton, Bruce. The Light Went Out: The Life of Patrick Hamilton. London: Constable, 1972. Hamilton, Patrick. Angel Street: A Victorian Thriller in Three Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1942. ———. Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl’s Court. New York: Europa Editions, 2009. ———. Impromptu in Moribundia. Ed. Peter Widdowson. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1999. Higdon, Hal. Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999. Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002. Jones, Nigel. Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton. London: Black Spring Press, 2008. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation” and Other Works, 1921–1945. The Writings. Volume 1. Introd. R. E. Money-Kyrle. New York: The Free Press, 1975. Koven, Seth. The Match Girl and the Heiress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Ed. and introd. Leonardo Quaresima. Rev. and expanded edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004. Laurents, Alfred. Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. New York: Applause, 2000. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1999. Linder, Douglas O. “The Leopold and Loeb Trial: A Brief Account.” Law2. umkc.edu/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/Account of trial.html Low, Barbara. Psycho-Analysis: A Brief Account of the Freudian Theory. Introd. Ernest Jones. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920. Lucas, John. “Patrick Hamilton: Hangover Square – 1941.” www.londonfictions. com/patrick-hamilton-hangover-square.html Marx, Karl. Surveys from Exile. Ed. and Introd. David Fernbach. Political Writings. Volume II. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Miller, D. A. “Anal Rope.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pp. 119–141. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Trans. from the 2d German edition. Introd. George L. Mosse. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. Fwd. Victor Gollancz. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1958. Overy, Richard. The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization: 1919– 1939. London: Penguin, 2010. Pulham, Patricia. “Colouring the Post: Death, Desire, and Homosexuality in Vernon Lee’s ‘A Wedding Chest.’” Critical Survey, 19.1 (2007): 5–16.

Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square  163 Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004. Rose, Jacqueline. Why War? – Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Ruskin, John. “Unto This Last”: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy. Ed. Lloyd J. Hubenka. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967. Sánchez-Pardo, Esther. Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986. Upward, Edward. Journey to the Border. Introd. Stephen Spender. 1938; rpt. London, Enitharmon Press, 1994. ———. “Statement for the Literature/Sociology Conference on ‘1936’ at Essex University, July 1978.” www.edwardupward.info/other-writings.html Vicinus, Martha. “The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?” In Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 83–106. Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Random House, 1969.

7

George Orwell, Futurity, and Male Homosexual Panic

As a writer, George Orwell is noteworthy for his mastery of the plain style in English modernism and for his direct colloquial address to his readers—often addressed with a familiar “you.”1 Regarding content, Orwell’s posthumous reputation was magnified during the Cold War by his early and continuing opposition to totalitarianism in both its Nazi and Stalinist forms, an effort which culminates in 1984 (1949), a future fiction satirizing Soviet Communism in particular, which remains his best known work. 1984 confirmed his reputation as a leading twentiethcentury liberal humanist. In this chapter, however, I am interested in another Orwell: one who championed the unemployed and manual workers during the Great Depression; who wrote news dispatches from Spain during the Civil War; and who, in his writing between 1938 and 1941, issued a prophetic call for the fashioning of a social democracy in England following the end of World War II. This same Orwell, however, was hampered by the ongoing effects of childhood trauma. In recent decades, his legacy has been challenged by literary critics who, according to John Rodden, object to Orwell’s handling of the topics of “race, gender, and class.”2 And feminist scholars such as Daphne Patai have drawn attention to misogyny and homophobia in his texts.3 In this chapter I recontextualize the mix of tender love and homophobic recoil that one finds in the representation of working-class men in Orwell’s writing. If Woolf, Strachey, and other modernists drew attention to the lasting negative impacts, public and private, of Victorian patriarchy, Orwell’s work testifies to the continuing destructive effects of male homosocial desire as constituted in the early twentieth century within the academic institutions in which he was formed: namely, his education at St. Cyprian’s school and Eton as well as his service as a young man in colonial Burma. For Orwell, that legacy involved a strenuous manliness with overt homophobia, especially as directed toward ‘Oscar-Wilde’ types including bisexual and homosexual writers such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden who, like Orwell, supported the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War but who, unlike him, declined to engage in military action. Orwell differs markedly from writers whom he

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  165 admired such as Maugham and Cyril Connolly who found in the writing of self-conscious subjects of male-male desire a necessary counter to “straight” assumptions about what manhood means. Connolly, bisexual himself and a friend of Orwell since their school days,4 regarded sexually dissident points of view to be an important component of literary modernism. “The equipment of the homosexual writer,” Connolly writes, “combativeness, curiosity, egotism, intuition and adaptability” is “greatly to be envied”5 (113). One effect of Orwell’s socialization was a high level of comfort with guns and the elements of military life. Upon leaving school, in the 1920s he served within the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Later he was severely wounded in military action in Spain. And still later he was active as a member of the Home Guard during World War II. In literary terms, the agonistic, prophetic tone of his political journalism recalls the rhetorical masculinity professed by what John Holloway and others have referred to as Victorian sages such as Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Hardy.6 Their example, along with that of Continental writers like Dostoevsky, also contributed to Orwell’s “‘sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time.”7 Orwell became a leading anti-Aesthete and anti-Decadent. Instead his sympathies are at times more with selfconsciously masculinist late Victorian writers such as Rudyard Kipling and William Ernest Henley in spite of the fact that Orwell detested their jingoism. In his journalism and political writing, he identified with mine workers but rejected the marriage of socialism with feminism and male love that the socialist and sexual radical, Edward Carpenter, had called for. Congruent with his interest in military life, Orwell sought out states of physical extremity. Just as powerfully, from his early experiences at boarding school onwards, he experienced intense, prolonged states of emotional, affective, and sexual abjection. This condition inflects familiar aspects of Orwell—his investigative journalism, his convictions of social justice, social and political anarchism, polemical invective, sociality, and conscious and unconscious sense of embodiment. Julia Kristeva evokes the term to refer to a double-sided state of simultaneous desire for and repulsion from an occluded object of desire. “Their looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside…, beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable….” The threat lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud, holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus,

166  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic that spasm that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.8 Literary critics such as Jeffrey Meyers have established contexts for Orwell’s plain style in American and English writing of the 1920s and 1930s.9 Orwell emulated the commitment to a popular audience evident in Maugham’s accessibility as a stylist and confidence in his readership (Meyers 2010 170). The pair are further connected by Maugham’s emphasis on the link between masculine character and nationality in Don Fernando (1935), a study of Golden Age culture in Spain.10 Maugham’s fascination in the book with Ignatius Loyola as a Spanish archetype resonates with aspects of Orwell’s own self-fashioning in a decade in which his experience in Spain proved to be crucial. Maugham begins his study with a summary of the first of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, a phantasmagoria of the torments of the damned in Hell. Continuing with a long section on Ignatius’s biography, Maugham focuses on features of the saint’s life that he shared with Orwell: serious illnesses, military service, near death from a wound in battle, indulgence in physical mortification, and a visionary relation to the future. Both figures resisted the shibboleths of ideology in their respective cultures while remaining confident in their ability as educators and exemplars to induce personal transformation and a shared sense of mission among their readers.11 Both men were prophets. Ignatius is seen as a leading figure in the Catholic Counter Reformation of the sixteenth century, in which he attempted to transform an as yet unreformed Church from within in response to the criticisms of Luther and others. Orwell was a Leftist who called Leftist thinking and practice into question in his critique of what he calls middle-class British Socialism in Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937); in his rejection of Soviet Marxism in Homage to Catalonia (1938); and in the political journalism of the early War years, in which he calls for the creation of a democratic socialist state in England following the defeat of the Axis powers. He also sought to redeem the heritage of the British imperial system by calling for the postwar transformation of Britain’s colonies and dominions into a commonwealth of democratic socialist nations (Essays, 171, 185–188). Orwell’s mystical experience of English landscapes and his imaginative identification with working- and lower-middle-class English people have proven to be part of his continuing appeal. Despite the bleak warnings of 1984, he thinks time forward. The final words of ‘England Your England’ and Other Essays (1954) are these: following War and the loss of empire, “England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.”12

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  167 In “Why I Write” (1946), Orwell says that already as a schoolboy he knew that he “wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound” (Essays, 2). Declining after Eton to apply for the scholarship that would have enabled him to continue his education at Oxford or Cambridge, Orwell decided instead to follow the line of his Anglo-Indian relatives and serve abroad. In practical terms, this decision meant competing for a position in the Indian Imperial Police, with Burma, where he had family connections, as his ultimate destination. In doing so, he in effect chose to exclude himself from membership in the upper division of the British caste system. He became a permanent outsider albeit one with connections inside. Above all, in 1922 Burma appeared to offer him an opportunity to find himself as a man. The move also provided the material of his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Overtly autobiographical and journalistic in style, the novel demonstrates the distinctive tendency of the narrative voice in Orwell to condemn contemporary socio-economic and political conditions while carrying forward an argumentative conversation with the reader. Orwell had early rejected the ideology of the white man’s burden. Notwithstanding, he had now chosen to become a colonial operative. The contradiction placed him in a doubtful but productive double bind during his five years in Burma. While he quickly concluded that Britain’s involvement in its colonies was driven primarily by economic objectives, the administrative duties that accompanied his post persuaded him that the Burmese were not yet capable of self-government. Moreover, despite his recoil from British imperialism, Orwell later came to believe that life for the Burmese under the control of Japan, China, or Russia would be far worse than it was under the British. He also found himself deeply resentful of the personal antagonism that he felt directed toward himself by young Burmese men who objected to the fact that the offer of limited self-government extended to India proper after World War I had not also been afforded to Burma despite that country’s nominal independence before direct takeover by the British in 1885.13 Burmese Days, which he began sketching early in his service there focuses on James Flory, a young timber merchant with a disfiguring birth mark who arrives in Rangoon at the age of 19 following an early education at a preparatory school and attendance at “a cheap, thirdrate public school.”14 When the action of the novel begins 15 years later  (64), Flory has arrived at views of Britain’s role in Burma similar to Orwell’s: “What was at the centre of all his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For as his brain developed…, he had grasped the truth about the English and their Empire. The Indian

168  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic Empire is a despotism—benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object” (68). Flory registers this knowledge primarily in a debilitating sense of lack of autonomy. “It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable.” Once silence in face of the ‘system’ is conceded, “all other kinds of freedom are permitted You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’s code. In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease” (69). It is through this individualist prism that Orwell launches the novel’s critique of empire. Orwell registers the decadence that Conrad and Maugham identified with the Orient in terms of its effects on colonial agents in the form of debilitating illnesses, alcoholism, and mercenary sex. As the plot unfolds, Orwell draws his own conclusions in terms of the disintegrative effects of colonial rule upon individuals, whether Burmese, Indian or British. In Flory’s eyes, the only possible escape from this decline is the unlikely but dreamt of possibility that while on leave in England, he might find a suitable young partner to marry. Beginning his long delayed first period of leave after having already served in Burma for a decade, this vision comes to him along with the “good food and the smell of the sea” en route to a stopover in Colombo. “It occurred to him…that he was still young enough to begin over again. He would live a year in civilised society, he would find some girl who did not mind his birthmark—a civilised girl, not a pukka memsahib—and he would marry her and endure ten, fifteen more years of Burma. Then they would retire—he would be worth twelve or fifteen thousand pounds on retirement, perhaps. They would buy a cottage in the country, surround themselves with friends, books, their children, animals” (70).15 But in a noirish twist of fate, at Colombo Flory finds a cable “waiting for him” that recalls him to his post immediately because of the unanticipated deaths by blackwater fever of three of his fellow managers. Flory’s choice of the word “girl” rather than woman in the preceding paragraph is indicative of his attitude toward women. Like other male protagonists in Orwell’s fiction, Flory sees women in relational terms: he regards them principally with reference to their ability to satisfy male desires. Five years later, he is yet more demoralized although the romantic fantasy still lingers, now taking the more poignant form of a realization that “there was only one way out. To find someone who would share his life in Burma—but really share it, share his inner, secret life, carry

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  169 away [with him] from Burma the same memories as he carried. Someone who would love Burma as [he now realized that] he loved it and hate it as he hated it. Who would help him to live with nothing hidden, nothing unexpressed. Someone who understood him: a friend, that was what it came down to. A friend. Or a wife?” The precarious status of marriage as a profession in the interwar years is registered in the structure of Flory’s thought. He recognizes that he needs “a friend,” conjuring the linaments of that figure in terms of the Classical tradition of equality in elite male friendship that he had studied at school. Flory has already learned that such a friend is not to be found within the colonial economy. But could he experience friendship of this sort in marriage to “a woman?” The question mark indicates his skepticism, which is shared with the recognition within Classical male friendship tradition that friendship in marriage was at best secondary in character because the institution was based in economic dependence and unequal status.16 At this point, an attractive young stranger arrives from England to live with relatives following the death of her parents. Penniless and subject to sexual harassment by her aunt’s husband, Elizabeth Lackersteen17 quickly recognizes that she needs a way out. Not surprisingly, Flory, yet more degenerated than earlier, projects his long deferred fantasy of normalcy onto the young woman, who is in fact much more likely to become in time the sort of British woman abroad who repels Flory: a “memsahib, … yellow and thin, scandalmongering over cocktails, making kit-kit with the servants, living twenty years in the country without learning a word of the language” (72). His misdirected desire leads, predictably, to a meeting, courtship, repeated rejections, and then catastrophe. Flory’s fancied idyll is a delusion that rationalizes his life in Burma on the basis of savings, not as yet realized, which he believes will make what he assumes to be the good life possible. In fact, however, he is wasting his life by converting it into labor in corrupting circumstances. Moreover, he ignores the basis of his anticipated security in profits to be secured by the theft of natural resources from a subject people. Although Orwell too thinks of women as the second sex, like Maugham he recognizes the double binds, psychological and economic, which deny them autonomy.18 In Chapter 6, in which the narrator introduces Elizabeth, he makes clear that she too is a victim of the English system of class and caste. She and her mother have been left high and dry as a result of the bankruptcy of her father, a war profiteer. Likewise, she has been betrayed by the seductive experience of a brief spell spent as a student at a school for upper-class girls. The taste for luxury consumption that Elizabeth discovered there makes her as much a dupe of the economics of consumption as Flory is of the economics of production. Her options for the future have subsequently been narrowed to those available for a moneyless young white woman at a remote district station. Moreover, even if Flory had succeeded in marrying her, the

170  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic couple likely would have experienced limited economic prospects once they returned to England. In other words, Flory’s dream, even were its elusive female component to materialize, is not a serviceable one, or at least not a securely middle-class one. Flory, Orwell writes, “had grasped the special nature of the hell that is reserved for Anglo-Indians. Ah, those poor prosing old wrecks in Bath and Cheltenham! Those tomblike boarding-houses with Anglo-Indians littered about in all stages of decomposition!... Poor devils, they know what it means to have left one’s heart in an alien and hated country” (72). When, after Flory’s death as a result of suicide, Elizabeth does accept an offer of marriage from Mr. Macgregor, the middle-aged, Scottish Deputy Commissioner at Kyauktada, Orwell colors this marriage of economic necessity with hints that her new husband may be a pedophile and possibly a passive male homosexual, active or latent. The novel repeatedly references pedophilia and male buggery. For example, U Po Kyin, a local magistrate, attempts to destroy the reputation of Dr. Veraswami, Flory’s friend, by accusing him of “making homosexual attempts on the Military Police drummer boy” (136). After Flory irritates fellow members of the European Club by proposing Veraswami as the club’s first non-white member, Ellis, an outspokenly racist Cockney, attacks Flory: “I should have thought in a case like this, when it’s a question of keeping those black, stinking swine out of the only place where we can enjoy ourselves, you’d have the decency to back me up. Even if that pot-bellied, greasy little sod of a nigger doctor is your best pal” (23). The narrator observes that Ellis “had never grown used to the sight of a black face. Any hint of friendly feeling towards an Oriental seemed to him a horrible perversity. He was an intelligent man and an able servant of his firm, but he was one of those Englishmen—common, unfortunately—who should never be allowed to set foot in the East” (24). Later in the novel, Ellis accuses Flory himself of being a homosexual, “a nigger’s Nancy Boy” (191). Orwell published his third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, two years later in 1936. If his first novel was directed against an imperialist ethos, the second is antagonistic toward middle-class aspirations of achieving distinction by means of success as an author. The novel’s protagonist, Gordon Comstock, is a lower-middle-class young man who aspires, quite inappropriately given his economic and educational background, to become a professional poet. The title of the long poem that he is writing, London Pleasures, associates him with the urban poetry of Decadent poets of the 1890s, in particular with John Davidson, whose work was admired both by members of the Rhymers’ Club and by early twentieth-century modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot. Davidson committed suicide in 1909.19 Although Keep the Aspidistra Flying also includes slurring references to ‘Nances,’ Orwell focuses on Comstock’s desire for heterosexual

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  171 intimacy, a suitable partner in marriage, and adequate financial means with which to support a family. These objectives exist in tension with his reluctance to sacrifice his personal integrity by taking an economically necessary but meaningless job. These preoccupations lend the novel a domestic temporality that simultaneously traces the nascent shape of a would-be author’s career. As it happens, these questions are also a focal point of discussion in Enemies of Promise (1938), Connolly’s contemporary study of English modernism. 20 For Connolly, these questions had important implications for literary history and form. To what extent was the naturalistic novel or, more generally, conventional literary realism adequate to deal with prosaic matters such as these at a time when the outbreak of a new war was widely anticipated? In the novel, Orwell writes: “Our civilisation is dying. It must be dying. But it isn’t going to die in its bed. Presently the aeroplanes are coming. Zoom—whizz—crash! The whole western world going up in a roar of explosives.”21 Despite the apocalyptic register, however, Orwell’s tone here is mainly satiric. At the start of the novel, Comstock quits his post in the New Albion advertising agency in order to pursue a career as a poet. This decision propels him onto a downward financial and psychological trajectory that continues until he is rescued at the end of the novel as a result of a fortuitous event. En route, he becomes acutely conscious of what might be described as a crisis of ‘the literary,’ signaled both in his eventual employment in a “two penny library” (224) and his subsequent decision to throw the manuscript of his poem down a drain. In the polemical essays about the crisis of the naturalist novel that Virginia Woolf had published in the late ‘Teens and early 1920s, she contrasted the construction of individual character by means of the enumeration of external details in the Edwardian novel to “soul,” the ultimate exploration of human subjectivity and motivation in classic nineteenth-century Russian fiction, in particular the novels of Dostoevsky.22 As Comstock obliquely approaches a decision to rejoin the ranks of the lower-middle-class work force, he dramatizes himself as Dostoevsky’s underground man: He had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself –to sink…. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think about the lost people, the underground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition.

172  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever. (227) The dramatic turn that enables Comstock to escape this fate draws at a distance upon the example of D. H. Lawrence’s idealization of virility in his essays, travel writing, and fiction. 23 The unanticipated pregnancy of Comstock’s long-suffering girlfriend, Rosemary, brings the young man to his middle-class senses. As a result, he accepts a renewed offer to return to the agency, where, it turns out, he now shows a real talent for writing advertising copy (272). Unable to solve the world, Comstock, the narrator, and the novel settle for the value that Comstock briefly eschewed, namely lower-middleclass “decency.” Comstock’s modest accommodation does not resolve the issues implicit in the realities of market commodification and its falsification of human consciousness and action but does provide a point of rest for his restless, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions: “Our civilisation,” Orwell writes, is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and aspidistras— they lived by the money-code, sure-enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’—kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. (267–268) Time is evident in the novel in the workings of the market economy, continual in the emphasis on the necessity of getting and keeping a ‘decent’ job but also contingent in the way in which Orwell registers the advent of the transatlantic science of marketing by means of a new arrival at the agency, namely “Mr Warner, a Canadian who had been five years with a New York publicity firm” (271). Warner is “a live wire” (271) who appears to draw out Comstock’s best efforts. In contrast, Orwell’s next and final domestic novel, Coming Up for Air, which was published three years later, in June, 1939, a few months before the United Kingdom declared war upon Germany, also marks time by means of economic modernization, in this case in the supersession by a corporate rival of the village seed store at one time owned by the father of George Bowling, the

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  173 novel’s protagonist. Although time in this first-person narrative functions primarily in psychological terms, it also undermines the axiom of imperial totality, which has been subverted by disillusionment, both personal and general, following World War I: “A sort of wave of disbelief was moving across England…. What should I be now if it hadn’t been for the war? I don’t know, but something different from what I am. If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.”24 The action of the novel consists in Bowling’s attempt to recover the past of his pre-War boyhood by playing hooky from the demands of present-day domestic life in a middle-class London suburb. The past that he seeks seems to offer the security of a space, maternal and nurturing, in which he can hope to recover a lost sense of wholeness. This wished for retreat includes a fantasy of being enfolded by Mother England as figured by an unspoiled Thames Valley ex-urban pastoral. Bowling’s preoccupation with his boyhood pastime of fishing likewise participates in fantasy. He yearns for the sense of self that he remembers having experienced in the time-out-of-time of semi-meditative stillness available to a youngster fishing by a quiet pool. Upon returning to his home town of Lower Binfield, however, Bowling discovers that the locality has in his absence been overbuilt with jerry-built suburban housing. Moreover, the magical fishing hole that he had discovered as a boy has been replaced by a trash heap. 25 Bowling’s disillusionment introduces yet another timescale into his and the reader’s consciousness, namely that of ecological time with its threat of calamity arising from the consequences of the human transformation of nature. 26 Bowling’s outing forces him to recognize that the past he has cherished is illusory. As for the future, like Comstock in Orwell’s earlier novel, Bowling imagines it in terms of armaments, falling bombs, and, at the end of Part 2, the onset of World War II (166). Living between loss and the threat of annihilation, Bowling regards the events of his biography to be a series of accidents as when, for example, a chance encounter with a former military officer results in his being offered the job that he holds with the Flying Salamander insurance company (150–153). Except for his marriage, which he considers to be a failure, Bowling regards his subsequent life, including parenthood, as without “event” (153). How then to live? In Michael Levenson’s reading of Orwell’s novels, time is redeemed by engagement with one’s continuing responsibilities, primarily domestic and work-related.27 This settlement provides a point of rest for both Comstock and Bowling as well as for Dorothy Hare, the protagonist of A Clergyman’s Daughter (1936). The most intimate moments of Orwell’s writing in this decade occur not in his fiction but in his journalism and involve, despite his

174  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic commitment to vitality, not marriage, women, and children but encounters with working-class men in situations of duress. For Orwell, the crucial norm of human existence is provided by the body. In “A Hanging,” his early autobiographical account of a judicial execution in Burma, the single humanist statement that occurs in the course of the essay depends upon the facticity of the body. As the condemned man is marched to the gallows, Blair (the essay appeared under Orwell’s given name) writes: Once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to kill a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness of cutting short a life when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working— bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery…. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less. (Essays, 16) The quotation emphasizes the integration of the human self, mind with body, materiality with spirit. In contrast, the loss of this integrity is figured in the essay by representing the condemned man in terms of part objects, with special emphasis on his “brown” skin (16). 28 Orwell brings the same intensity of perception, humane reason, and the acknowledgment of shared existence to bear in perhaps his best-known piece of journalism, Chapter 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier. This chapter includes Orwell’s account of accompanying coal miners in their work underground as part of his research in writing the book. His attention to working men’s bodies is acute, analytic, aesthetically appreciative, and chaste. Moreover, in his repeated use of the word “you” to signify both himself and the implicitly male reader, he shares his awareness of the physical and psychical extremity to which he was willing to subject himself in his participant journalism. The reflexive “you” invites his readers simultaneously both to aestheticize and to share in the immediacy of the hot, cramped, coal-dust filled mine. Under ground, the men shoveling look and work as though they were made of iron. They really do look like iron—hammered iron statues—under the smooth coat of coal dust which clings to them from head to foot. It is only when

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  175 you see miners down the mine and naked that you realise what splendid men they are. Most of them are small… but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads …. No one could do their work who had not a young man’s body, and a figure fit for a guardsman at that. 29 Homage to Catalonia (1938), set in Spain during the Civil War, begins with a moment of male cross-class solidarity comparable with those that Orwell had experienced in the mining country but with the stakes raised since, although coal mining was a dangerous occupation, the young militiaman whom Orwell singles out in the opening paragraph of his report from Spain in 1937 is marked, at least in Orwell’s estimate, for an early death. Again Orwell relates an experience of strong physical, emotional, and political identification with an attractive young working-class man, in this case an Italian arrived in Barcelona to enlist as a fighter on the Republican side in Spain’s civil war: “In the Lenin Barracks…, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table. He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders.” The young man makes a powerful impression: “Something in his face deeply moved me.”30 Orwell continues: “As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.”31 Writing during World War II several years later, Orwell remembered the young Italian soldier with his “fierce, pathetic, innocent face” (Essays, 230). At the end of the essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943), Orwell records a poem that he had written in memory of the young man two years after he met him in Spain and at a time “when the war was visibly lost” (Essays, 232). Orwell assumed that the man was by now “dead.” The Italian soldier shook my hand Beside the guard-room table; The strong hand and the subtle hand Whose palms are only able

176  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic To meet within the sounds of guns. But oh! what peace I knew then In gazing on this battered face Purer than any woman’s!…. ………………….. You came and your deeds were forgotten Before your bones were dry, And the lie that slew you is buried Under a deeper lie; But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit. No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit. (Essays, 232, 233) What remains to Orwell and the reader is the inviolability of the militiaman, especially visible in his face. This fact—and intuition—outlasts both the meretricious rhetoric of Falangists and Soviet Communists as well as the “sordid and degrading” detail (216) of war in all times and places. A key to the combination of desire, idealization, and renunciation prompted in Orwell’s chance encounter with the Italian militia man may be found in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a long, cathartic essay written late in Orwell’s life and published posthumously. In the essay, Orwell accounts for the obsession with purity and impurity that haunts much of his writing by returning to St. Cyprian’s, the scene of his early schooling. 32 It is not often that a schoolboy memoir begins with the shameful exposure of an eight-year-old boy’s bed-wetting and subsequent beatings. Such, however, is the case with this essay. As if in a scene in A. C. Swinburne’s flagellation literature, the shamers and punishers proliferate over the course of five pages, beginning with the Headmaster and his wife, “Flip,” “an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding-habit” (416), whose eyes “never lost their anxious, accusing look.”33 It was Flip who doled out false smiles and favors to the boys along with orders for their punishment. In Orwell’s account, additional female accusers accompany her, in the first instance, a “strange,” unidentified female visitor, whom the boy imagines to be prepared “for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a hunting-whip.” Flip identifies young Blair as a “bed-wetter,” who will soon be submitted for beating to the entire “Sixth Form.” Orwell recalls: “To this day I can feel myself almost swooning with shame as I stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if… [the stranger] were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment; it was

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  177 simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been told of my disgusting offense.” When the boy does wet his bed again, it is “Margaret, the grim statuesque matron” (418), who finds him out and refers him to the Headmaster for punishment. There follows the boy’s confession, followed by a beating with a “bone-handled riding-crop” (418). The beating is repeated after Flip overhears the boy unwisely boast upon leaving that it hasn’t hurt very much. During this second beating, the Headmaster loses his temper after he accidentally breaks the crop. By the end of the scene, the boy has been fully abjected: “I had fallen into a chair, weakly snivelling…. I was crying partly because this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly… to convey: [sic] a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them…. This was the great abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating was a turning point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined” (419). The bed-wetting stopped “though at a heavy price, I have no doubt” (420). It was only Orwell’s determination to hold on to his early conviction of his mother’s love that permitted him to escape from such experiences without bearing a life-long burden of anger and hatred: “Looking back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my mother” (Essays 450). With her confusing shifts from pretended concern to physical and emotional abuse, Flip unwittingly took upon herself the anger that Blair might otherwise have directed against his mother, whose choice it had been in the first place to exile him to St. Cyprian’s. 34 As a child there, he never felt safe to let his mother know how unhappy he was. As Meyers points out, however, later in life Orwell himself abjected the women who devoted themselves to him such as his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.35 And of course there is also the “battered face” of a young Italian soldier, “purer than any woman’s.” Orwell wrote the essay in response to “White Samite,” Connolly’s reminiscence of his and Orwell’s time at St. Cyprian’s (Meyers 2000, 19). Connolly remembers character-formation as having been the prime objective of the school’s program: “‘Character, character, character,’ was the message.” Character in this context prepared the students for service in the civil or police services of Britain’s overseas dependencies. Alumni of St. Cyprian’s would “find their vocation in India, Burma, Nigeria, and The Sudan, administering with Roman justice those nations for whom the final profligate overflow of… [the school’s] character was all the time predestined” (160).

178  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic Among students, two qualities worked to subvert this emphasis. The first was critical “Intelligence” (164), realized, for Connolly, in Orwell’s intellectual independence. “The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself, read Shaw and Samuel Butler and rejected” the jingoistic ethos that pervaded the school during the Great War (164). Also in resistance was “Sensibility” (164), which Connolly associates with another student, Cecil Beaton, the bisexual socialite, designer, and photographer. “Sensibility” was further associated with “romantic escape, the purple patch…. We were still in the the full Tennysonian afterglow” (166). Intellectual revolt and aesthetic excess, however, were also associated with the disgrace of “homosexuality” (164), epitomized in the name of that “criminal degenerate, Oscar Wilde” (166). Despite the school’s emphasis on moral cleanliness, faculty, administrators, and the chaplain appear to have been obsessed with the topic of solitary—or group— vice, a continual topic of moral reproof. The effect produced was one of institutional double-think, in which both master and pupils were perversely incited to impure thoughts and deeds, a reality to which the school’s sordid physical environment, harsh cold in winter, dirty bath water, compulsory daily plunge, floggings and beatings, and lack of privacy all contributed. This environment also helped stimulate a reaction formation in the practice of sentimental friendships, especially between younger and older boys. Connolly’s essay focuses obsessively on the several sorts of male romantic friendships that he cultivated at the time. Orwell’s preoccupation with this topic and his account of the disciplinary order of the school are both implicitly sexual. Headmistress Flip mentally charted a revolving wheel of “Elizabeth and Essex” relationships (162), from which she dangled individual students. The school’s order required that one ‘suck up’ to figures of authority, most of all, to Flip. Government by personal favor has a long history, frequently sexualized as in the image of Elizabeth and Essex. As well, from at least Tudor to late Victorian times, the cultivation of favor between powerful and less powerful males at court and elsewhere was satirized in political verse, speech, and pamphlets as a form of buggery. Those who sought or accepted favors were judged to be pathics.36 In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell remarks: Flip was frankly capricious…, a flirtatious queen surrounded by courtierlovers, laughing and joking, scattering largesse, or the promise of largesse…. Flip was inextricably mixed up in my mind with Queen Elizabeth, whose relations with Leicester and Essex and Raleigh were intelligible to me from a very early age. A word we all constantly used in speaking of Flip was ‘favour.’ ‘I’m in good favour,’ we would say, or ‘I’m in bad favour.’ (434)

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  179 “Whenever one had the chance to suck up, one did suck up, and at the first smile one’s hatred turned into a sort of cringing love” (435). Hence Orwell’s weird friendship with Flip and the Headmaster, an intimacy which “included canings, reproaches and humiliations” when he fell short of their expectations as a potential scholarship-winner. Their duplicity filled him with a sense of failure. I hated both of them. I could not control my subjective feelings, and I could not conceal them from myself. But it is wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors? So I was taught, and so I believed…. From the age of eight, or even earlier, the consciousness of sin was never far away from me. If I contrived to seem callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of shame and dismay. All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good. (428) At the same time, Orwell saw through the school’s ideology of character: “‘Character,’ which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others” (443). In the midst of this spiritual squalor, however, one thing carried Orwell through, “an incorruptible inner self,” aware that its “true feeling” toward Flip and her husband “was hatred” (435). “I was aware of the impossibility of any subjective conformity. Always at the centre of my heart the inner self seemed to be awake, pointing out the difference between the moral obligation and the psychological fact” (444). In the second half of the essay, Orwell returns to the question of bodily impurity in a four-page section devoted to “a homosexual scandal” (Meyers 2010, 8) in which he found himself to be wrongfully entangled. Connolly, who minimizes the topic of sex among boys at the school, claims that he and Orwell fell out of favor as a result of having been discovered to be in possession of a copy of the first two books of Compton Mackenzie’s 1913 “succés de scandale,” Sinister Street (Bowker 45). In the novel, Michael Fane, the naïve young protagonist, comes briefly under the influence of Arthur Wilmot, a middle-aged homophile who approaches Michael at Elson’s Bookshop in Hammersmith. 37 Michael distances himself from this possibly incriminating contact in the following chapter, “The Yellow Age,” in which he successfully intervenes on behalf of schoolboys accused of a similar offense. Previously, Michael had found romantic friendships between younger students to be charming, “blooming like two flowers on a spray [and] shed[ding] a fragrance so poignant that tears came springing to his eyes” (2.9. 155). Now he feels a need to maintain the line between innocence and experience in schoolboy friendship. Interrupting a hearing to defend the boys from the Headmaster’s judgment, Michael protests: “I know these kids—these two boys, I mean, quite well. It’s impossible for any of this

180  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic to be true. I’ve seen them a lot this term—practically every day. Really, sir, you’ll make a terrible mistake if you expel them. They’re awfully decent little chaps. They are really, sir. Of course they’re too frightened now to say anything for themselves. It’s not fair for everybody to be set at them like this” (2.9. 157). Michael’s directness disarms the accusers while rallying other masters attending the session who are dismayed at its likely damaging effects on the accused. Orwell’s involvement in a similar situation had been rather different. In the essay, he acknowledges to his shame that: “Once, towards the end of my time, I even sneaked… about a suspected case of homosexuality I did not know very well what homosexuality was, but I knew that it happened and was bad” (435). On another occasion, he panicked when a “trivial accident,” possibly the Sinister Street episode, caused him to be suspected as one of a number of students who had been caught involved in “group masturbation” (Essays 436). Even though he was not among the students formally accused and punished, the impact upon him was devastating: “Till then I had hoped that I was innocent, and the conviction of sin which now took possession of me was perhaps all the stronger because I did not know what I had done” (Essays, 436). The state of knowing ignorance expressed in these citations likely was a common experience among public school boys. In An Autobiography (1883), for example, Anthony Trollope records his confused response when he found himself inadvertently caught up in a similar scandal at his school.38 Sexual humiliation, guilt, and shame as well as sexual revolt are again to the fore in Orwell’s final book, 1984. So also is irrational and excessive punishment. As at St. Cyrpian’s, the regime of incitement, repression, arbitrary enforcement, and suppression that exists in the fictional state of Oceania is identified with the overarching and opaque face of the Law. In 1984, the face is identified with both Big Brother and O’Brien, the government agent upon whom Winston Smith, the protagonist, is oddly fixated. O’Brien later betrays both Smith and his lover, Julia, to the secret police.39 At the end of the novel, as if in reply to Melanie Klein’s theory of infantile guilt and reparation, Smith, the solitary intellectual rebel, reduced to a state of total psychical confusion, wishes to suckle the absent breast or phallus of the tormentors who have stalked him through the course of the book.40 Looking up “at the enormous face” of Big Brother on a telescreen, Smith thinks: “Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”41 As a result of his death soon after completing 1984, Orwell’s exorcism of what he referred to as “psychological fact” in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” abruptly ended.42 In retrospect, especially in the view of humanist and neo-Conservative commentators, Orwell’s chief value has been held

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  181 to consist in his affirmation of the individual in the face of the totalitarian state, whether Fascist or Communist. Christopher Hitchens, for example, sees Orwell’s life and writing as constituting “a testament to human tenacity and ‘that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion.’”43 Orwell’s humanism in 1984, however, is far more radical than Hitchens suggests. In it, Orwell negates key modernist and humanist values such as the importance of memory, the present, and history in the formation of the human psyche.44 1984 demonstrates the vulnerability of these terms to psychological and social falsification or erasure. No aspect of the psyche can be reserved from manipulation. In this context, character ceases to exist. It must be borne in mind, however, that despite the psychological endgame that Orwell came to following the War, during the period of the Phoney War and the Blitz earlier in the decade, he had arrived at his most positive prophetic annunciations of the advent of real democracy—and socialism—in England following the War. Despite the failure of this prospect to be realized as the Cold War took hold, Orwell did not repudiate this vision nor the value of popular decency upon which, in his mind, it rested. The Appendix to 1984 obliquely underscores this point since it appears to have been written at some point in the twentieth century at a time after the totalitarian state of Oceania—as well, presumably, as its similarly governed rivals—has been superseded. In this unfigured new order, it is possible once again to cite one of the leading documents of republican constitutional tradition, a discourse and a text that the language of Newspeak had been invented in order to render literally incomprehensible: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed” (384). Today it is difficult to read these words without being aware of their silences—for instance the absence of an address to women. One is aware too of the men, women, and children, Native Americans and African American slaves, omitted or fractioned in the founding constitutional documents of the United States. In seeking a better order, it may be better to direct attention to the textual gap that occurs between the end of the novel 1984 and its Appendix. In Orwell’s book, the events that make the Appendix possible have yet to be written. H. G. Wells is an early twentieth-century writer who was highly aware of the dangers posed by modern imperialism. Jay Winter argues that the negative apocalypticism of novels such as The War in the Air (1907) needs to be read dialectically as part of a larger discussion in which Wells reaffirms his confidence in the potential of the English people to work with others to overcome the grave dangers implicit in the modern Western state and in technological innovation unmoored from civic

182  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic discernment.45 Wells proposed to overcome these dangers by creating a post-imperial democratic world federation of states, a solution that Orwell found to be a dream as impossible as it was, in his view, undesirable (Essays, 189–190). Orwell was a localist. Nonetheless, as the Appendix makes clear, 1984 is a timely warning not a pessimistic keen. In a new social order, something more is both necessary and possible than the posed alternatives of the control state versus the recovery of the values of liberal humanism. The text by Thomas Jefferson that the narrative voice cites is, literally, a revolutionary document. Between 1984 and its Appendix, Orwell’s text implicitly posits the occurrence of a future revolution as already a historical fact. This gap is what Winter elsewhere refers to as the structural “discontinuity” which exists in utopian (and dystopian) fictions between the radically different world imagined in the text and the “contemporary conditions and language” which the author must perforce reference. In Orwell’s Appendix, the space of revolution exists implicitly in the “radical act of disjunction.”46

Notes 1 Alex Woloch’s Or Orwell may be regarded as something of a booklength gloss on Orwell’s declaration in “Why I Write” that “Good prose is like a window pane” (Orwell, Essays, 7. See Woloch, 8–12). On the plain style in English modernism see also Connolly, Enemies of Promise, viii,  19— hereafter cited as Connolly; Kenner, “The Politics of the Plain Style,” and Crick, Introduction, Orwell, Essays, xiii–xv; see also Rodden, The Unexamined Orwell, 260. 2 Rodden, The Unexamined Orwell, 2. 3 Ibid., 1–2. See also Peter Stansky’s unsigned review of Patai’s book in the American Historical Review. 4 Banville, “The Strange Genius of the Master,” 15. Maugham was both married and a father. 5 Connolly, 113. 6 Holloway, The Victorian Sage; Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs, 41–72. 7 Cited by Jeffrey Meyers in Orwell: Life and Art, 40—hereafter cited in text and notes at Meyers 2010. 8 Powers of Horror, 1. Kristeva imagines the abjected subject as in search of purification of a petit objet a, in this case a phantasmatic battered mother. Stuart Schneiderman explains: “For the psychoanalyst the important object is the lost object, the object always desired and never attained, the object that causes the subject to desire in cases where he can never gain the satisfaction of possessing the object” (cited in Kristeva, x). Orwell does not investigate what this object may be for himself; but he limns the trajectory of this desire in fictional characters discussed in this chapter such as James Flory and Winston Smith. See also Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. Chapter 7—hereafter cited in notes as Meyers 2000. 9 Meyers 2010, 134–146.

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  183





















(Essays 32)

184  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic 29 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 23. The final sentence glances at the transactional availability of Guardsmen in London for sex with other males pejoratively designated as “queers” or “poufs” (Houlbrook 181 182). In another off comment, at the end of his sculptural description of the miners’ bodies, Orwell remarks: “The first time I was watching the ‘fillers’ at work I put my hand upon some dreadful slimy thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew tobacco” (24). 30 Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 7. Subsequent page references to this work in the text are to this edition. 31 On homoerotic touch in wartime, see Das, Touch and Intimacy, 146–151. 32 The standard study of these terms in cultural anthropology is by Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966). 33 Page references in the text to “Such, Such Were the Joys” are to Essays. Bernard Crick believes that Orwell may have been familiar with Sigmund Freud’s essay, “A Child is Being Beaten” (George Orwell, 418 n. 17). On Swinburne, see Christopher Lane, The Burdens of Intimacy, 73–92. 34 Bowker, George Orwell, 28. Blair was expected to restore his family’s damaged finances. For the Ida Blair/Flip duality, cf. Bowker, 48. 35 Meyers, Orwell 2000 (Chapter 7). 36 I discuss this perversion of friendship in Friendship’s Bonds. 37 Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street, Book 2, Chapter 8. Subsequent page references to this work appear in the text. 38 See Dellamora, “Stupid Trollope.” 39 Cf. Meyers 2000, 285. 40 Cf. Melanie Klein, “Any source of joy, beauty and enrichment (whether internal or external) is, in the unconscious mind, felt to be the mother’s loving and giving breast and the father’s creative penis, which in phantasy possesses similar qualities” (Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” 336). 41 Orwell, Animal Farm; 1984, 370. 42 For a Freudian account of psychology in the novels of George Orwell, see Smyer, Primal Dream and Primal Crime. 43 Kakutani, “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read,” C23. 4 4 I have in mind the theory of “moments of being” that Woolf articulates in her unpublished memoir and in the stylistic and formal innovations of her fiction. See Chapter 5. 45 Winter, Introduction, War, xxiv. 46 Ibid., xiv.

Bibliography Banville, John. “The Strange Genius of the Master.” New York Review of Books, February 9, 2017, 14–15. Bluemel, Kristin. George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Bowker, Gordon. George Orwell. London: Little, Brown, 2003. Connolly, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. Rev. ed. New Foreword by Alex Woloch. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008. Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Rev. ed. London: Secker & Warburg, 1981. ———. Introduction. In George Orwell, Essays. London: Penguin, 2000. Pp. vii–xxv. Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005.

Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic  185 Dellamora, Richard. Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ———. “Stupid Trollope.” Victorian Newsletter, 100 (Fall 2001): 22–26. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1974. Diment, Galya. A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2011. Gransden, K. W. “Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Letters to S. S. Koteliansky.” The Twentieth Century, 149 (January–June, 1956): 22–32. Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002. ———. “Why Orwell Still Matters.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. Pp. 201–207. Holloway, John. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument. New York: Norton, 1965. Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005. Kakutani, Michiko. “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read.” New York Times, January 27, 2017, C17, C23. Kenner, Hugh. “The Politics of the Plain Style.” In Reflection on America, 1984: An Orwell Symposium, ed. Robert Mulvihill. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1966. Pp. 58–65. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation.” In Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works: 1921–1945, ed. Melanie Klein. Introd. R. E. Money-Kyrle. New York: Free Press, 1975. Pp. 306–343. Koven, Seth. The Match Girl and the Heiress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982. Landow, George P. Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Lane, Christopher. The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity. New York: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999. Lee, Alex. Review, Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens. Yale ­Review of Books, August 19, 2002. http://yalereviewof books.com/why-orwellmatters-book-by-christopher-hitchens-reviewed-by-alex-lee/ Levenson, Michael. “The Fictional Realist: Novels of the 1930s.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. Pp. 59–75. Mackenzie, Compton. Sinister Street. Book I and II. 1913. Reprint. Lavergne, Tennessee: ICGtesting.com, October 13, 2016. Maugham, W. Somerset. Don Fernando. London: Vintage, 2000. ———. A Writer’s Notebook. New York: Vintage International, 2009. Meyers, Jeffrey. Orwell: Life and Art. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2010. ———. Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: Norton, 2000. Orwell, George. Animal Farm; 1984. Introd. Christopher Hitchens. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. ———. Burmese Days. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1962. ———. A Clergyman’s Daughter. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1936. Reprint. Breinigsville, Pa.: ICGtesting.com, July 30, 2016.

186  Orwell, Futurity, and Sexual Panic ———. “England Your England” and Other Essays. London: Secker & Warburg, 1954. ———. Essays. Introd. Bernard Crick. London: Penguin, 2000. ———. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010. ———. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Penguin, 2000. ———. The Road to Wigan Pier. Foreword by Victor Gollancz. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1958. Pattai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study of Male Ideology. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Reynolds, David. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century. London: Norton, 2014. Rodden, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. ———. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George Orwell.” New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989. ———. The Unexamined Orwell. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2011. Rozanov, V. V. Solitaria. Trans. S. S. Koteliansky. Including biographical material by E. Gollerbach and nos. 8 and 9 of The Apocalypse of Our Times. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Smyer, Richard I. Primal Dream and Primal Crime: Orwell’s Development as a Psychological Novelist. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1979. Stansky, Peter. “Review of Daphne Patai, The Orwell Mystique.” American Historical Review, 90.4 (October 1985): 937–938. Wells, H. G. The War in the Air. Ed. Patrick Parrinder and introd. Jay Winter. London: Penguin, 2005. Woloch, Alex. Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2016. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953–1967. Zytaruk, George J. “The Phallic Vision: D. H. Lawrence and V. V. Rozanov.” Comparative Literature Studies, 4.3 (1967): 283–297.

8

Queering Past—and Future—in Sarah Waters’ Affinity

Margaret Prior, the primary protagonist of Sarah Waters’ novel, Affinity, engages the topic of history in a self-conscious way in her notebook entries in the opening pages of the novel. At this point, Prior is still mourning the death two years earlier of her father, a noted historian of the Italian Renaissance, who wrote in the mode of conventional cultural history, focusing primarily on the personalities and accomplishments of great men. Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) is among the best known nineteenth-century works of this type. Burckhardt argues that the Renaissance constitutes a crucial moment in the development of modern civilization: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness –that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation— only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.1 Regarding women, Burckhardt argues that “in the upper classes… [they] stood on a footing of perfect equality with men” (2: 390, 389). “The educated woman, no less than the man, strove naturally after a characteristic and complete individuality” (2: 391). Nevertheless, “these women had no thought of the public; their function was to influence distinguished men and to moderate male impulse and caprice” (2: 391). Margaret was pleased to play the role of handmaiden as her father’s beloved research assistant. The two were close. But she also sought ways in which to affirm her own individuality. In particular, she eagerly looked forward to a long anticipated research trip to Italy on which she and her father were to be accompanied by her friend Helen, with whom,

188  Queering Past and Future in Waters the reader later learns, Margaret was at the time romantically involved. After the unexpected death of her father, however, Margaret found herself at home under the claustrophobic supervision of her mother. Bereft of her father, the opportunity for travel and research, and the prospect of intimacy with Helen, Margaret responded by attempting to take a fatal dose of morphia. In other words, she chose extinction in preference to life on the conditions offered. This background narrative brings into relief the question: How can the model of history in which Margaret was trained do justice to what she later describes as her “queer nature” and her own developing “story”2? By the end of the novel, Margaret fully recognizes that this story will necessarily be that of a subject of female same-sex desire. As it happens, in the 1870s and 1880s male scholars of the Renaissance who were sexually drawn to members of their own sex made use of their writing and research in order to explore the emotions and affects of male love.3 By the end of the century, they and their sympathetic readers were beginning to define male and female same-sex desire as categories of individual and social identity. But Waters attempts to express female same-sex desire at a time when its scientific study was only beginning. In the work of Richard Von Krafft-Ebing and others, the study of sexual identities in the late nineteenth century is characterized by an ethos of liberal individualism.4 Margaret’s preoccupation with the possibilities of self-development locates her within the terms of this ideology. Liberalism also denotes what Burckhardt described as an “objective” approach to statecraft and the creation of the modern state. In England since the 1830s, state regulation had focused on groups that Henry Mayhew singles out for close observation in an encyclopedic study entitled London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Both Mayhew and Waters are preoccupied with the administration of working and lower-class populations, in particular of women. Liberalism in this sense provides one defining horizon of the criminality of the novel’s secondary protagonist, Selina Dawes, a female convict with whom Margaret becomes entangled. Selina’s diary entries constitute the novel’s second narrative, interleaved with the first. At the beginning of the action, Margaret has become a “Lady Visitor” to inmates of the female ward of London’s Millbank Prison. In this role, she is told, she can provide “a finer mould” for the inmates’ “poor unguarded hearts,” comparable with those of “children” and “savages” (12). This new field of research for Margaret will soon become freighted with frustrated sexual desire, illegal complicity, and, ultimately panic, rage, and paranoia. In her first notebook entry, she asks herself how her father would tell the story that she now hopes to write, both her own and that of the prison (7). Constructed in 1816 on the bank of the river Thames, Millbank was a model institution inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s design for a Panopticon,

Queering Past and Future in Waters  189 i.e., a circular prison distinguished by the presence of a central courtyard from which staff would have 24-hour visual access to each prisoner, isolated in his or her individual cell.5 Surveillance, isolation, shame, and repetitive manual labor were the key elements of Bentham’s Enlightenment program for prison reform. Waters maps Margaret’s initial visit by working from Mayhew’s detailed description and illustrated plans for this complex structure in his study, The Criminal Prisons of London (1862). The prison was comprised of a free-standing octagonal wall framing six linked sets of pentagonal prisoners’ wards, which in turn surrounded an administrative tower and chapel located in a central sixsided courtyard. Margaret shows herself to be an observant visitor despite the disorienting psychological impact of the shifting angles of the interior and exterior walls. She also pays close attention to the female matrons and prisoners whom she encounters. In doing so, she quickly comes to recognize that as a Lady Visitor, she too is subject to the gaze of the prison’s chief matron and staff. Margaret’s account of her first visit is notably lacking in objective distance. Instead, she writes in the baroque style of Victorian sensation fiction.6 Her writing is peppered with similes and metaphors. For instance, studying a plan of the prison beforehand, she fancies that “the pentagons” resemble “petals on a geometric flower” (8). As preparation, she nervously examines “a volume of the [phantasmagoric] prison drawings of Piranesi:…. I spent an anxious hour, studying them,” she writes, “thinking of all the dark and terrible scenes I might be confronted with” (9). Undercutting the moral function of the visitorship, she evokes her experience in terms of a multiplying series of literary genres: not only sensation fiction but also fairy tales, gothic romance, Spiritualist mystery, detective fiction, and Victorian thriller. This mix of genres suggests that Affinity, like other Victorian pastiche fictions dating from the late 1960s onwards, may belong to the contemporary genre of postmodern fiction.7 To characterize Waters’ Victorian pastiche as postmodern is, however, misleading, first of all since, unlike John Fowles in his paradigmatic postmodern novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), she does not interrupt the period style and narrative conventions of her book with defamiliarizing contemporary intrusions. More significant for Waters in appropriating Victorian genres has been her deep familiarity with and long-held affection for Victorian fiction. This attachment has also characterized the work of a number of other twentieth-century writers who continue to be drawn to Victorian genres including Sylvia Townsend Warner. Likewise, Virginia Woolf’s The Years began as The Pargiters, a modernist adaptation of the conventions of Victorian genealogical fiction. The modern antimodernist Radclyffe Hall began a genealogical novel, The Cunninghams.8 And Patrick Hamilton considered writing a novel in imitation of the sensation fiction of Wilkie Collins.9 Even the combination of philanthropic

190  Queering Past and Future in Waters intentions with a question-begging eroticism as in Affinity is itself Victorian. Consider, for example, Seth Koven’s take on the relations between Dr. Barnardo and his “boys.” “Victorian reformers and philanthropists understood that what made the ‘morality’ they proclaimed so powerful was in part its capacity to inflame and contain the unruly possibilities and passions of the ‘imagination’ to which it was so intimately bound.’”10 English writers continue to make the genres of classic English literature their own, including both the plays of Shakespeare and Victorian novels.11 Waters, for instance, has acknowledged the impact on her work of the example of Angela Carter’s parody and pastiche of sensation fiction and other Victorian genres in Nights at the Circus (1984), which Waters sees as having helped shape her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998).12 For her part, however, Waters has cautioned against the tendency in both gay and lesbian historical fiction to exclude the experience of black and working-class subjects of same-sex desire, a cautionary note that she herself heeds in Affinity.13 In this chapter, I emphasize Affinity as being “post-” in a different way, namely, in its dependent but critical relation to an important body of second-wave feminist Victorian social history and literary criticism dating from the 1970s onward.14 At the end of Margaret’s visit, she finds herself briefly alone in a corridor where the silence is broken by what she describes as“a sigh, a single sigh—it seemed to me, a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story; and the story being such a complement to my own mood I found it worked upon me, in that setting, rather strangely” (26). Curious, she looks for the source through the vertical slot in the door of an adjacent cell which is referred to by staff as the “inspection” and by cellmates as “the eye” (23). “I put my fingers to the inspection slit, and then my eyes,” Margaret writes. “And then I gazed at the girl in the cell beyond—she was so still, I think I held my breath for fear of startling her” (26). Margaret is immediately impressed by the beauty of the prisoner, whose name, she later learns, is Selina Dawes (42). For now, Margaret reads the young woman’s face as a sign: “I was sure that I had seen her likeness in a saint or an angel in a painting of Crivelli” (27), a painter of the Italian Renaissance.15 There is another sign as well: namely, the violet that Selina holds in her hand: “As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow” (27). The unexpected appearance of the violet functions as an important index— of Margaret’s susceptibility to young female beauty; of her desire to instill the flower with symbolic, life-giving force; of her degree of loneliness and deprivation.16 Selina’s breath, godlike, is able, in Margaret’s imagination, to inspire life in another object. Nonetheless, something is amiss here. Given the isolation of the prisoners and the poor soil of the prison grounds, there is no way that the flower should be in Selina’s possession. Margaret is observing a violation of the prison’s rules: someone

Queering Past and Future in Waters  191 else, a prisoner or member of staff, must have given Selina the flower. Margaret, though, chooses to ignore this fact and thereby becomes from the start complicit in Selina and her abettor’s transgression. Margaret learns something else as well. The prison has been designed as a total system. Nothing foreign to its daily routine—except for visits by Lady Visitors—is permitted. Margaret now knows, however, that the system is porous. She also has reason to recognize that visits by Visitors such as herself constitute an obvious weak link in the prison’s security. The incident of the violet implies a need on Margaret’s part to remain vigilant in an environment where matters are neither transparent nor in order. Neither persons nor things—nor “tokens” (285)—should be taken at face value. Affinity revisits the relationship between the middle-class philanthropic woman and the working-class woman, criminal or otherwise, in need of practical and emotional assistance, a tie which is characteristic of mid- and late-Victorian liberal reform efforts. In Margaret, Waters explores how unknowing this relationship can be—particularly in ignoring the reality of the power dynamics at play. Waters emphasizes this aspect of exchanges between women by focusing on the exchange of glances within the prison environment. The word gaze, omnipresent in the novel, is materialized in the vertical slot in each cell door. The “inspection” or “the eye” (23) subjects each prisoner to the gaze of prison matron and Lady Visitor alike, to their attention, use, and potential misuse just as Margaret immediately subjects the face and hands of the prisoner holding the violet to her own private needs. As corollary, the scene indicates to the reader how unknowing Margaret is about her desires and her unconscious projection of them, this despite the fact that Margaret makes clear in her notebook that she is aware that her relationship with Helen included a consciously sexual element. Now that Helen has married Margaret’s brother Stephen, Margaret resents the fact that Helen acts as though the kisses that she and Margaret formerly exchanged had never occurred. The reader will eventually learn how the subordinated and disempowered object of the Lady Visitor’s gaze succeeds in reversing the explicit power dynamic of the situation. Once Selina and Margaret begin to converse, Selina plays the exchange to her own advantage. Her ability to con Margaret scores a reversal in terms of class: the subjected partner succeeds in subjecting her bourgeois better. Prior to the emergence of feminist historiography in England in the 1970s and later, a successful assault on British academic historiography had occurred in the emergence of important historians of the actions of male working-class protagonists who contested the patterns of deference and exploitation that existed in early industrial England and before.17 The genealogy of Waters’s novel includes both feminist and class-based lines of revisionary work. As well, Affinity draws on Waters’ deep knowledge of Victorian

192  Queering Past and Future in Waters literary tradition. For example, Aurora, the pet name that Selina gives Margaret, recalls Aurora Leigh, the heroine of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1857 book-length eponymous poem. Late in this, Aurora, a successful poet, strikes a domestic alliance with Marian Erle, an abused working-class woman who has given birth to a child out of wedlock. In well-known lines, Aurora says to her “sweetest sister”: Come, … And sit within my house and do me good From henceforth, thou and thine! ye are my own From henceforth…. Come, — and henceforth thou and I Being still together, will not miss a friend, Nor… [your child] a father, since two mothers shall Make that up to him. (VII: 117–120, 122–125)18 In these lines, Aurora convokes female marriage as superior to marriage between a man and a woman. Affinity is a cold-blooded exercise in genre. In its intense focus on the relationship between Margaret and Selina, the novel invites its reader to engage with it as though they were reading a twentieth-century lesbian romance. Thereby seduced, she is encouraged to identify with Margaret’s gradually shaping desires of intimacy with Selena—rather as Patricia Highsmith in her lesbian romance novel, The Price of Salt (1952), anticipates that young post-World War II women may identify with a shop girl’s growing fascination with a glamorous young matron. At the end of Affinity, however, Waters shows us how illusory Margaret’s projections onto Selina have been and how they depend for their existence upon a failure, at once cognitive and ethical, on Margaret’s part to recognize the asymmetries of power, class, and age that exist between the two women. Not only a romance, Affinity also shares in the conventions of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novel with its suggestions of the permeability of different levels of existence. The genre typically takes one of two forms. In the supernatural gothic, uncanny events require a supernatural explanation. In contrast, in the rational or Enlightenment gothic, the resolution of the novel will disclose the material causes of its uncanny effects. Affinity is a gothic novel of the second type. Dawes, though in her twenties, is already a “spirit-medium” (315). Spiritualism by the mid-nineteenth century had become a form of middle-class popular entertainment but in some instances, could be deemed criminal.19 Hence the words on the tablet outside Selina’s cell, which identifies her crime as that of “FRAUD & ASSAULT” (27). 20 ­Nineteenth-century mediums were frequently female; and spiritualism itself was often claimed to be a specifically female mode of knowledge.

Queering Past and Future in Waters  193 As such, it has been of interest to late twentieth-century feminist historians. 21 In Affinity, spiritualism functions as the practice of a female epistemology that both names and makes possible new, mobile, and transgressive modes of emotion and relationship. Hence Selina’s preferred word, Affinity, a term drawing upon the myth of twinned souls— and bodies—in Plato’s Symposium. Late in the novel, Margaret writes: “We were joined in the spirit and joined in the flesh—I was her own affinity. We had been cut, two halves together, from a single piece of shining matter” (336). Affinity in the novel functions as a synonym of embodied affective, emotional, and at times sexual ties between women. The word suggests a knowledge known only to closely affiliated women for whom it offers a useful code word for passionate love shared by them but foreign to the knowledge of outsiders. In Affinity the word is also masculinized since in the private séances that Selina stages for nubile young women, her control, Peter Quick, is male, even mustached. Some of Selina’s clients must have found it both surprising and quite stimulating when her half clothed female confederate materialized in the dark, tickled them with the touch of ‘his’ prickly facial hair, then began fondling and undressing them while Selina too began to disrobe. Selina’s practice of mediumship offered young virginal clients an opportunity to engage in safe sexual adventures.22 Only at the end of the novel does Margaret learn about the place of sexual assault in Selina’s practice. Only then too does Margaret learn that Ruth Vigers, a new servant at Margaret’s home, is actually Selina’s partner in crime. When Margaret earlier agrees, however, to assist Selina in escaping England, she does so in the hope that her frustrated Italian idyll with Helen may now find fulfillment with this beautiful young woman. At the outset, Margaret is an upper-middle class woman, nearly 30, who lives at home with a mother who obviously believes that, as an unmarried older daughter, Margaret’s place is by her mother’s side. Also still at home is Priscilla, a very good-looking younger sister, advantageously engaged, who appears to be determined to be everything that her bookish older sister is not. At 30, Margaret has become a Victorian type, the spinster hysteric. Disappointed in love, her notebook traces her campaign to play the role of Augusta Leigh in order to convert Selina Dawes into her own Marian Erle. Shortly after Margaret begins visiting Selina, she begins to receive tokens of the young woman’s Spiritualist powers. The existence of such signs is endemic to Spiritualism, an anthropology of multi-leveled human existence that requires material evidence for proof. The signs are necessary in order to guarantee the validity of Spiritualism as a material science that draws in particular upon electric wave theory in Victorian physics. 23 Soon after meeting Margaret, Selina is able to arrange for Boyd, one of Margaret’s domestic servants, to give notice. At Boyd’s

194  Queering Past and Future in Waters suggestion, Vigers is hired to replace her. Vigers’ presence within the household provides Selina with useful information about Margaret’s surroundings, personal possessions, and history. Vigers also is responsible for such “tokens” as the unexplained appearance of a bough of orange blossoms in Margaret’s bedroom. These material facts help Margaret rationalize her wish to endow her new personal interest with the powers of affinity. It is also the case, however, that at the same time that she becomes aware of the technology of surveillance embodied in the prison, she also learns of a prisonlike “maze” of internal sensory and psychological confusion. Her description of entering the prison for the first time doubles as a description of her first notebook entry. She experiences both building and writing as a “story… which has so many separate lives in it, and is so curious a shape, and must be approached so darkly, through so many gates and twisting passages” (7). Margaret’s story too will be a “dark text” like that on the enamel tablet screwed into the brick wall behind the chief desk: “Thou has set our misdeeds before Thee, and our secret sins in the light of thy confidence” (11). Much heterosexual feminist history and literary criticism of the last quarter of the twentieth century contended that middle-class women’s emotional lives centered on other women and that women found happiness in the female relations of the middle-class home. These writers also contend that a non-sexualized female love was compatible with heterosexual marriage. 24 More recently, Sharon Marcus has argued that a symbiotic relationship existed between female friendship and successful heterosexual marriages and vice-versa. 25 It was not unusual in the tight social networks of Victorian bourgeois domesticity for young adults involved in an intense same-sex friendship to choose to marry the opposite-sex sibling of their special friend. In this way, fervent samesex bonding could be reconciled with the opposite-sex ties upon which the bourgeois family depended for its continued existence. For example, Arthur Henry Hallam, to whom Alfred Tennyson was devoted, became engaged to Alfred’s younger sister, Emily, shortly after meeting her. In Affinity, however, Waters takes a much different view. After learning that Helen has become engaged to Margaret’s brother, Stephen, Margaret attempts suicide. Waters suggests how bleak and empty the life of a spinster daughter could be following the death of a supportive father, how difficult to find intellectual occupation or meaningful work outside of domestic responsibilities. Waters shows, too, how a woman such as Helen could find herself caught in a triangulated relationship between a devoted husband and an intimate female friend, in this case, her husband’s sister. Helen attempts to manage both relationships by offering Margaret the role of a sisterly friend. But Margaret, resentful, refuses to accept. Instead, she continually implies that Helen acts in bad faith. Had Margaret been

Queering Past and Future in Waters  195 able to sign on to a continuing friendship on Helen’s terms, she and Helen could have remained close, even, in some scenarios, have continued their intimacy or become long-term lovers. 26 Waters’ fiction does not disprove Marcus’s contention about successful female friendship in tandem with male-female marriage, but the novel does afford a look at the point of intersection between heterosexual marriage and female friendship. At the end of the novel, Margaret learns that Selina’s desire tracked to a fellow working-class woman, who was her bold, cunning, and passionate lover. In her final entry, Margaret writes: “I thought of… all the times… [Vigers] must have sat, in her dim room above my own, writing of her passion as I wrote of mine” (350). Second-wave feminist writing on Victorian women considered female friendship not only in personal terms but also across lines of class. Important early discussions focused on cross-class relations between female Social Purity reformers and young working-class women who engaged in casual prostitution in poor neighborhoods in military and naval towns. Over time, wellintentioned interventions by male and female moral reformers in tandem with the efforts of civilian and military bureaucrats intent on reducing the incidence of venereal infection among men, especially in the British navy, often resulted in dire social consequences for local women. One of the most interesting outcomes of Judith Walkowitz’s research on attempts by middle-class female activists to reform the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 is to demonstrate how attempts to regulate prostitution among female members of the working class in port towns such as Southampton and Plymouth resulted in driving a wedge between women who might occasionally engage in sex for pay and other members of their working-class communities. Once forced to register as prostitutes and to present themselves on a regular basis for public medical inspections, these women found themselves permanently ostracized from family and neighbors.27 Attempts by “Ladies” to rescue their fallen sisters involved what Jill Rappaport refers to as a relation of gift exchange in which women received assistance and moral support in exchange for moral reform, decorum, and acceptance of the inevitability of their lower-class status. 28 The ambiguities and contradictions involved in sisterly linkages of this sort have proven to be a continuing source of creative feminist research and analysis. 29 Waters’ novel has a significant place in this body of work. As her continual references to “the eye” in the gates of prisoners’ cells emphasizes, sisterly interventions by “Lady Visitors” provided the latter with privileged visual access to imprisoned women regardless of the prisoners’ own preferences. As in Margaret’s case, visual condescension licensed erotic and other projections upon their objects. In these ties, one party was by definition entitled while the others were “subjected,” to use Walkowitz’s word (1982, 191).

196  Queering Past and Future in Waters The extent of Margaret’s entitlement—and the confidence with which she assumes it—is dramatically revealed in the rage with which she responds once her romantic fantasy has been dashed and she realizes that Vigers has stolen both the train tickets and the money that Margaret had secured to take herself and Selina to Italy. “Every time I stood in Selina’s cell, feeling my flesh yearn towards hers, there might as well have been Vigers at the gate, looking on, stealing Selina’s gaze from me to her” (341–342). Margaret proceeds to tear apart Vigers’ room: I went to the bed they lay on, and turned the sheets, looking for marks and smudges. Then I went to the bowl upon the shelf. There was still a little cloudy water in it, and I sifted it with my fingers until I found a hair that was dark, and another, quite gold. Then I cast the bowl to the floor, and it broke in pieces, and the water stained the boards. I took the jug, meaning to smash it—but it was of tin and wouldn’t break, I had to beat it till it buckled. I seized the mattress, and then the bed; the sheets I ripped. The tearing cotton—how can I write it?—it was like a drug upon me. I tore and tore, until the sheets were rags, until my hands were sore; and then I put the seams to my own mouth and tore them with my teeth. I ripped the rug upon the floor. I took the servant’s trunk, and pulled the gowns from it and tore at them—I think I would have torn at my own dress, my very hair if I had not gone panting to the window at the last, and put my cheek against the glass, and clutched the frame, and shivered. (342) Margaret has lost a lover—but to lose her to Margaret’s own servant is a twist of the knife. Margaret’s flaws, including her dependence on the drug chloral throughout and laudanum increasingly in Part 5, are much more evident upon a second reading of the novel. The first time around, a reader is likely to identify with Margaret’s sense of sexual frustration, isolation, and entrapment. Waters, however, compels the reader to disavow Margaret’s psychical investment in favor of a belated sentimental education. The ending leaves Margaret’s future uncertain. In her panic, she has given prison staff and the constable whom her mother had arranged to have posted outside the family home good reason to be suspicious of the extent of Margaret’s involvement with the prisoner and her plans for escape. At the same time, officials may decide not to pursue these leads so that they may avoid further embarrassment to Millbank’s management and damage to the respectability of Margaret and her family. Whether her recklessness will prompt her family to decide to have Margaret institutionalized is another open question. As for Margaret’s dashed hopes, success, even in the absence of Vigers, would in all probability have been short-lived. Selina would have found it difficult to resume her trade in

Queering Past and Future in Waters  197 Italy. The escape of a young, good-looking medium from a well-known criminal prison in London would have attracted widespread coverage in the press. And even if Selina were to manage to find clients among the small circles of American and British expatriates living in Rome, Venice, and Florence, scandalous rumors about the “dark séances” would follow the pair.30 Selina’s case is more complex than Margaret’s. A cynical manipulator of the emotions of others, she herself is the victim of a lifelong string of abuses in relation to her ‘gift.’ Her choice of criminality, moreover, makes sense given the meager options available and the early deaths often experienced by members of London’s casual labor class. Finally, as a self-conscious rebel against the subjection demanded of the poor, Selina fits the framework of Aestheticist and Decadent revolt that later in the century would be associated with another performer, Oscar Wilde. The novel’s implicit reference to Wilde, who today continues to be an important figure both in gay and other forms of sexually dissident culture as well as in postmodern and performance art more generally, is by no means accidental. Consider, for example, the Oscar Wilde Temple, an exhibition and performance space created by the British artist-partners McDermott and McCough at the Church of the Village in Greenwich Village, New York, in fall, 2017.31 The novel begins with a passage from Selina’s diary. Sequestered in her bedroom after the latest séance has gone wrong, she wishes that she “might close my eyes & open them & be at Bethnal Green again, with my own aunty in her own wooden chair” (4). This scene of cozy East End domesticity, however, is belied by the pecuniary end to which Selina’s aunt put her niece’s gift of hearing voices. Following her aunt’s death, Selina moved to a residential hotel for mediums run by the Vincys, but Mr. Vincy’s prurient interest determined her to seek safety elsewhere. Elsewhere proved to be the home of Mrs. Brink, a wealthy client, whose desperation to receive communications from Aurora, her deceased mother, placed her under Selina’s influence. Subsequently, the two women became lovers, and Mrs. Brink held séances at her home for friends at which Selina could demonstrate her special powers. Brinks also arranged for private sessions, at first limited to the two women themselves but eventually expanded so as to include Ruth [Vigers] as well, who served at Selina’s maid. 32 This ménage apparently was preferable to the fate that might await Selina should she fall into the charge of administrators of the Poor Law. As an orphan or half-orphan at the time of Aunty’s death, Selina was legally liable to become a ward of the state. In The Match Girl and the Heiress, Seth Koven makes evident how unwelcome that eventuality could be. Koven’s deeply detailed book is a study of how the “love” (1) between Nellie Dowell, a worker in a match factory, and Muriel Lester, the daughter of a well-to-do ship builder,

198  Queering Past and Future in Waters undergirded their work together in founding and running Kingsley Hall, a residential and social center in the East End dedicated to the memory of Lester’s deceased brother, Kingsley. Arguing that this book “offers an intimate history of very large-scale historical developments and processes,” Koven describes the Hall as both “Britain’s first Christian revolutionary ‘People’s House’” and “the institutional incarnation of Nellie and Muriel’s friendship” (3). Lester, who later became an international celebrity, went on to become a suffragist, pacifist, and successful campaigner for the creation of international peacekeeping institutions. Koven argues that her career traces a course expanding from Victorian Christian liberal domestic philanthropy to the creation following World War II of global institutions to build world peace. Nellie herself died early, in 1923, as a result of the effects of repeated bouts of work-related rheumatic fever. As a youngster, Dowell and her three sisters lived with their parents in a good-sized terrace house on a major artery in the East End. Her father, William, a sailor, “earned a very respectable living” (26) as a first mate. When he died at sea, however, her mother, Harriet, now destitute, was forced to give Nellie up to the care of Poor Law officials in 1883. As a result, Dowell was admitted to the Forest Gate School, a huge and impersonal government institution several miles from home. Designed to meet bureaucratic mandates rather than to provide a supportive environment for its hundreds of inmates, Forest Gate neglected both the emotional and intellectual well-being of the youngsters in its care. In Koven’s words, “the institution” sought “to mold them into a deferential, patriotic source of labor” for the Army and the Navy if male and for domestic service in the homes of the well-to-do if female (45). While the school protected children from abuse on the streets, it did little to prepare them for adulthood and reasonably paid work. As a result, shortly after leaving school, many of the young women became street walkers (40). In December, 1909, Nellie fell seriously ill as a result of dangerous working conditions in the match factory where she was employed. Transferred from the Poplar and Stepney Poor Law Infirmary to London Hospital, her condition deteriorated severely as a result of the improper prescription of opioids. As a result and unknown to her mother, Nellie was transferred to a Poor Law hospital for lunatics. Had her mother not succeeded in tracing her whereabouts, Dowell, who by this time was extremely disoriented, likely would have died. Such were the hazards of treatment under the Poor Law. There is no shortage of terms—of friendship, family ties, or religious ardor—with which to express Margaret’s passion for Selina.33 Terms from both Romantic poetry and Greek mythology were also frequently used to this end.34 One instance in the late nineteenth century is the

Queering Past and Future in Waters  199 use of the word “lesbian” as a euphemism for sexual desire between women; but “lesbian” was not used at this time to refer to a specific sexual identity. In the late 1860s and early 1870s minority sexual identities were only beginning to be defined.35 Notwithstanding this fact, Vigers’ female masculinity shares features of what the new science of sexology defined as “sexual inversion.”36 However, the relationship between Selina and Vigers makes more sense in another context. The two women are most closely linked by their partnership in crime. Mediumship, as already mentioned, was defined at the time as a criminal activity. More generally, the combination of illicit sex with other criminal acts was not unusual among members of what Marx called the lumpen and Gareth Stedman Jones refers to as “Outcast London.” An example earlier in the century may be found in Fagin’s relationship with members of his young den of thieves in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. 37 Crime has a special valence in some leftist writing of the end of the century. Selina and Vigers’ swindle and break for freedom, for example, links Affinity with the anarchism of Oscar Wilde’s polemical essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891). Both her diary and Margaret’s narrative function within the genre of prison literature even though Selina wrote hers in the year before she was incarcerated. 38 Both texts also share in common with De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s posthumously published letter written from prison, the confession of illicit same-sex love together with refusal to acknowledge it as guilty. In the unexpurgated edition of De Profundis (1905), Wilde comes out as the lover of Bosie Douglas. Selina comes out as the partner of Vigers in both sex and crime. Sociologically, her diary grounds working-class female same-sex relationship in criminal behavior and a Darwinian struggle for survival. In addition, Selina and Vigers’ relationship is based in Vigers’ female masculinity.39 In The Soul of Man under Socialism, Wilde argues that the choice of a life of crime is preferable to spending one’s life in low-waged, health-destroying drudgery or in subjecting oneself to the indignities of the Poor Law. He writes: “The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible” (256).40 Later he argues that an individual “may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection” (265). Wilde uses as an example of “a sin against society” a sexual crime, namely female adultery. Recalling the discussion in John 8: 1–11 of the woman taken in adultery, Wilde observes that “Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because her love was so intense and wonderful” (265). Affinity begins with a diary entry by Selina, in which she reports on aspects of the disastrous séance in which the hysterical response of a young new client resulted in both an inadvertent death and in charges

200  Queering Past and Future in Waters being brought against Selina. Both the diary and Margaret Prior’s journal deal in “dark” (31) material. At the end, Margaret strongly implies that she is once more about to attempt suicide—but successfully this time. She also says that she is about to burn her notebook; however, the latter intention remains unfulfilled. Instead both Waters and Margaret give the reader a future-oriented way of reading the end of the novel. While making her final preparations to leave London with Silena, Margaret has Vigers’ deliver on her behalf a letter to her beloved Helen. In it, Margaret defends her passionate attachment to Selina by linking it with her earlier, more profound, affinity with Helen. Margaret hopes that that bond will lend truth to her action despite the condemnation that it will receive in England. I wish that if anyone should look for faults in this, then they will find them with me, with me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules. I could not find a place in it to live and to be content. That this has always been true—well, you of course know that, better than anyone. But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me! I have been led to it, Helen, by someone marvelous and strange. You won’t know this. They will tell you of her, and they will make her seem squalid and ordinary, they will turn my passion into something gross and wrong. You will know that it is neither of those things. It is only love, Helen—only that. (315–316) In a passage that might be described as Margaret’s version of Wilde’s De Profundis, one might think of this letter, despite its desperate circumstances, as opening onto utopia at the end of the novel. Even after Margaret recognizes that Selina has duped her, she makes no attempt to visit Helen’s home in order to retrieve the letter before Helen returns from a trip north with Margaret’s family. Margaret wants the letter to be found, particularly if her name is to be linked with Selina’s in the police investigation that will follow the prisoner’s escape. The letter is Margaret’s testimony and legacy although not in the ways in which she had intended. After the novel ends, Helen and her husband will return to London where Helen will read the letter. Margaret believes that Helen will understand that love between women speaks for itself. This final missive, however, is disseminated further to the reader(s) of the novel, who will live in a time when life-long pair-bonding between two women, whether sanctioned by marriage or not, will have become possible.

Queering Past and Future in Waters  201

Notes 1 Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1: 143. 2 Waters, Affinity, 315, 7. 3 Relevant Victorian works are Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, and Symonds, Male Love and Studies in the Greek Poets. For these and other texts, see Dellamora, Masculine Desire, and Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality. Additional titles are Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty, and Dustin Friedman, Before Queer Theory. Waters discusses the homoerotics of late Victorian Classicism in Chapter 2 of her doctoral thesis, Wolfskins and Togas— hereafter cited in the notes as WT. 4 On Krafft-Ebing, see Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature. For another liberal approach, see Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, volume 2. Social democratic and socialist perspectives also existed. Consider, for example, Whitman, Leaves of Grass, and Carpenter, Selected Writings. For relevant critical and biographical material, see Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry; Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis, and Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter. 5 The prominence in critical theory of the concept of the Panaopticon is due to Michel Foucault’s influential discussion of the concept in Discipline and Punish. Lauren Goodlad, however, has complicated this view by drawing attention to the fact that Bentham’s discussion of the concept and his model prison designs have a strongly pastoral element missing from Foucault’s analysis (Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, 8–12). 6 Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) shares a number of similarities with Waters’ novel. 7 On Postmodernism, see Jameson, Postmodernism, and Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism. 8 Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 62, 102, 162, 186. 9 Jones, Through a Glass Darkly, 238.









202  Queering Past and Future in Waters 21 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 171–189. Other important studies are Dixon, Divine Feminine, and; Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy. ­Additional texts are Owen, The Darkened Room, and Oppenheim, The Other World. 22 A passage in Casanova’s memoirs suggests that it was not unusual for experiments in the occult to end in unconventional sex. He provides an account of his charlatanry with Madame d’Urfé, a former beauty, now “immensely wealthy and entirely convinced of the truth of alchemy,” whose most cherished dream is to transfer her soul into a young male body. Unsurprisingly, Casanova knows just the ritual that will allow Seramis, as he now calls her, to give birth to herself as a male child—it requires the assistance of a water sprite (actually a hot little number named Marcolina dressed in green) and some of the most difficult sex of the Venetian adventurer’s career. (Dirda, “The Pleasures of Casanova,” 24, 25) 23 For a succinct account, see Hazelgrove, 194–196. See also Luckhurst and Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. 24 See for example, Chapter 2, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” in Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 53–76, originally published in 1975. 25 See Marcus, Between Women and also Dellamora, “Friendship, Marriage, and Between Women.” 26 See Martha Vicinus’s comment on Mary Benson, sister of the Cambridge philosopher, Henry Sidgwick and wife of Edward Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 to 1896: “Within the confines of a traditional marriage, Mary Benson found room for lesbian love and a radical reconceptualization of God” as both male and female (Intimate Friends, 98). See also Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed. 27 Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 151–170, 192–213, 238–245). 28 Koven shows how early childhood educational materials inculcated relations of deference and noblesse oblige between working-class recipients of aid and middle-class women performing acts of charitable patronage (The Match Girl and the Heiress, 75–76. See also, Slumming, 183–227. 29 See, for example, Rappoport’s chapter on the complexities of sisterhood in the Salvation Army’s efforts to evangelize women (106–138). 30 These circles were sites of transgressive female desire involving the American Shakespearean actress, Charlotte Cushman, at mid-century and later the author Vernon Lee among others. See Markus, Across an Untried Sea, and Colby, Vernon Lee. 31 Loos, “A Shrine to Oscar Wilde,” New York Times, September 8, 2017, C13, C19. 32 Vigers’ fetishistic interest in Selina and her personal possessions calls to mind that of Mrs. Danvers, the “blindly adoring, sinister and loyal housekeeper (Judith Anderson)” of Rebecca de Winter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Academy Award winning picture of 1940, “Rebecca” (www.filmsite.org/rebec.htm). For her part, Radclyffe Hall provided a dwelling near her own home for the well-known medium, Mrs. Gladys Osborne Leonard, in order to facilitate Hall in communicating with the spirit of her deceased longtime partner, the singer Mabel Batten. For Hall’s intensive psychical research, see Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall, 53–76. 33 Vicinus discusses these modes of rhetoric as ways of articulating female intimacy in Intimate Friends.

Queering Past and Future in Waters  203 34 See WT, 73–107. 35 In 1869, Carl von Westphal was the first researcher to define sexual inversion in a case study of a woman whom he referred to as a “congenital invert” (Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 239). 36 See the preceding footnote as well as Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 43. 37 Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds, 43–45, 215 n.15, 217 n.55. See Koven’s discussion of Dr. Barnardo’s Boys’ Homes (Slumming, 88–138). 38 Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 181, 193–195, 233 n. 8. 39 What in the twentieth century might have been referred to as Vigers’ butch masculinity is described in the novel’s Victorian terms as working-class toughness. 40 Page references in the text to The Soul of Man under Socialism are to Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic.

Bibliography Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. 2 Vols. 1929. Reprint. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. Carpenter, Edward. Selected Writings. Volume One: Sex. London: GMP Publishers Ltd., 1984. Carter, Angela. Wise Children. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991. Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. New York: Overlook Press, 1997. Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003. Davis, Whitney. Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010. Dellamora, Richard. “Friendship, Marriage, and Between Women.” Victorian Studies, 50.1 (Autumn, 2007): 67–74. ———. Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ———. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990. Dirda, Michael. “The Pleasures of Casanova.” New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007, 22–25. Dixon, Joy. Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Volume 2. 1910. Reprint. New York: Random House, 1936. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1981. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979. ———. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980.

204  Queering Past and Future in Waters Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Cape, 1969. Friedman, Dustin. Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2019. Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986. Ghandi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. Goldhill, Simon. A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003. Hamilton, Patrick. Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton. London: Black Spring Press, 1991. Hazelgrove, Jenny. Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. The Politics of Postmodernism. 1989. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991. Jones, Nigel. Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton. London: Black Spring Press, 2008. Koven, Seth. The Match Girl and the Heiress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014. ———. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004. Livesey, Ruth. Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. Loos, Ted. “A Shrine to Oscar Wilde,” New York Times, September 8, 2017, C13, C19. Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979. Mayhew, Henry, and John Binny. The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life. 1862. Reprint. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1962. ———. London Labour and the London Poor. 4 Vols. New York: Dover, 1968. Mitchell, Kate. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Myers, Frederic W. H. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 1. 1903. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.

Queering Past and Future in Waters  205 Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1873. Rappaport, Jill. Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012. Rowbotham, Sheila. Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love. London: Verso, 2009. Souhami, Diana. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985. Stedman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Symonds, John Addington. Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and Other Writings. Foreword by Robert Peters. Ed. John Lauritsen. New York: Pagan Press, 1983. ———. Studies of the Greek Poets. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. ———. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane, 1975. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1775–1928. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982. ———. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. 1980. Reprint. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Waters, Sarah Ann. Affinity. New York: Riverhead, 1999. ———. Fingersmith. New York: Riverhead, 2002. ———. Tipping the Velvet. London: Virago, 1998. ———. Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian and Gay Historical Fictions: 1870 to the Present. Ph.D. Thesis. London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, Univ. of London 1995. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film. New York: Penguin, 1993. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin, 1976. Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Random House, 1969. ———. De Profundis and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 1986. www.filmsite.org/rebec.html

9

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau remarks that, in contrast to historians in the West, writers of historical narratives in India have shown an ability to accommodate concurrent but different temporalities without difficulty.1 Likewise, in his novel, The Hungry Tide (2004), the Anglo-American Indian author, Amitav Ghosh, writes simultaneously in varying time-scales. 2 The time likely to strike a reader most forcibly is meteorological. Weather conditions function in the novel as early warning signs of the catastrophic impacts of ongoing climate change.3 The title of Ghosh’s novel refers to analogous effects, which occur ceaselessly in the mangrove swamps of the Sundarban islands, where the action of the novel takes place. A related term is the Anthropocene, which is the period of time in which human interventions in the environment have become agents of long-range change.4 In Victorian studies, the Anthropocene is usually thought of as originating in the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries although human actions such as deforestation have in fact long had world-changing impacts on geography and climate.5 Despite the already devastating effects of the environmental crisis in Bangladesh and Northeastern India, the plot of The Hungry Tide (2004) conforms to the temporal dialectic that characterizes Georg Lukács’s analysis of classic realist fiction in The Historical Novel (1937; trans. 1962). Overlapping this temporality in the novel are incursions of animist world-making and world-destruction, experienced both in terms of myth and ritual but also in moments of spiritual transformation in characters’ lives. Genealogical time too is significant for Ghosh since, as he observes in an “Author’s Note,” the career of Nirmal Bose, one of the central protagonists, recalls that of Ghosh’s uncle, “the late Shri Satish Chandra Ghosh.”6 Finally, both the alterity of the British Raj and its delusional aspirations are emphasized at the same time that the novel demonstrates how the ideals and enterprises of late Victorian Ethical Socialism have been incorporated in modern and contemporary Indian practice. Multiple temporalities are one index of the cosmopolitanism of Ghosh’s novel, which draws on his graduate training in social and archeological

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  207 anthropology among rural villagers in Egypt’s Nile Valley during the 1980s. Ghosh knows that archaeological digs provide juxtaposed visual records of the development of human culture at different times. And in his work as a social anthropologist he frequently bears witness to the simultaneous existence of social-cultural attitudes and beliefs that logically should but in fact do not cancel one another out. In the course of Ghosh’s doctoral research, he became vividly aware of the shock effects of modern consumerism, media technologies, and modes of warfare arising from regional rivalries. In his first book, In An Antique Land (1992), he shows how postcolonial modernity fractured traditional ways of life in the Egyptian countryside, a disintegrative process that continues in a different setting in The Hungry Tide as well. A more general time-frame in which these differences occur is Viconian. For the eighteenth-century humanist, Giambattista Vico, the history of civilization is a series of cycles of growth, maturity, and decline which operate in terms of an internal logic independent of a larger providential or dialectical framework. The organic dynamism of Vico’s conception of human thought and praxis means that for him cyclical repetition is neither progressive nor a repetition of the same.7 Repetition with a difference is both possible and probable without implying a larger, enfolding pattern of improvement and/or decline. Within twentyfirst–century consciousness, the notion of time as cyclical appears to be confirmed by ever more dramatic evidence of a deteriorating global climate. In this context, however, cyclical deterioration is ongoing. The term cosmopolitanism has often been used in association with late eighteenth-century critiques of Enlightenment appeals to universal reason.8 Amanda Anderson has affirmed late Victorian cosmopolitanisms invested in the more limited Kantian terms of “critical reason” and “aesthetic detachment” or free play of the imagination.9 The term, however, has also been used to refer to transoceanic cultural exchanges between Britons and Bengalis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contemporary postcolonial critique, the term is used to characterize even wider historical and geographical contexts. Françoise Lionnet, in particular, has re-invented the term through the lens of creolization, a process under way in Mauritius and elsewhere on the shores of the Indian Ocean since the arrival of Western European fleets in the sixteenth century.10 Ghosh too has contributed to expanding the meaning of the term. In In An Antique Land, Ghosh, in the persona of a naïve young narrator, disillusioned by insistent parochial interrogation on the part of the Egyptian villagers among whom he is living, decides to shift his focus instead to the vestigial archive of Bomma, the medieval Indian slave of Abraham Ben Yiju, a Jewish rabbi and trader whose travels ranged from Aden to Mangalore.11 For Ghosh, the researches triggered by the discovery of the existence of this individual eventually open onto the horizon of a multi-ethnic, multi-denominational world grounded

208  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh in commercial, linguistic, and social exchanges. In the same decades in Egypt, the Jewish rabbi and medical doctor, Moses ben Maimon, became a shaping force in a cosmopolitan Jewish, Muslim, Classical, and Catholic scientific and theological culture in the Mediterranean basin. As Moshe Halbertal has observed in his biography of ben Maimon, this cultural renaissance continued to exist and flourish despite violent disruptions.12 In the character of the marine biologist Pyali Roy, Ghosh subsumes a genealogy, at once fictional and historical, of cosmopolitan feminism that emerges explicitly in his following novel, Sea of Poppies (2008).13 Paulette Lambert, the novel’s young tomboyish protagonist, is the independent-minded, scientifically curious daughter of a French botanist, Pierre Lambert, who serves as the assistant curator of the Royal Botanical Gardens of Calcutta. Both Paulette’s name and her father’s link the pair with Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the field scientist employed in Mauritius at mid-century whose novel Paul et Virginie (1788) was to become the founding document of francophone nationalist sentiment in Mauritius. In contrast, however, to the prudish heroine of Saint-Pierre’s novel, who drowns in a shipwreck off the coast of Mauritius, weighed down by the clothing that she refuses to remove, Ghosh’s Paulette is the subject of a thoroughly creolized experience that betokens the island’s mixed-race future. Paulette grows up with Bengali as her first language; with a native ayah who takes the place of her own mother, deceased in giving birth; and with Jodu, her ayah’s infant son. Jodu becomes the inseparable companion of Paulette’s childhood, with whom she later sets off en route to Mauritius.14 In The Hungry Tide Ghosh traces impacts of late Victorian cosmopolitanism in the history of the settlement of the fictional island of Lusibari, founded by Sir Daniel Hamilton, a wealthy Scot who made a fortune in nineteenth-century Calcutta and, second, in the experimental settlement of Dalit refugees on Morichjhãpi, in the Sundarban archipelago, in 1978 and 1979. In both cases, separated by 75 years, Britons and Indians found themselves motivated by an ideal of cooperative citizenship. Recoiling from both sectarian and state violence and from the Indian nationalist fantasy of Marxist-Leninist revolution from above, Ghosh’s twenty-first–century characters move toward personal and social transformation in ways that synthesize a new respect for local knowledges with animist spirituality, contemporary marine biology, humanitarian philanthropy, and an ideal of individual self-fashioning. In the late Victorian period, elite Bengalis visiting London could do so under the illusion of a shared imperial citizenship.15 In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh shows how the premise of a cosmopolitan civic identity held in common with Britons, albeit quickly contradicted by events, has continued to shape Indian geography, history, and subjectivities up to the present. In Sea of Poppies, set early in the reign of Victoria,

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  209 Ghosh is unsparing in his criticism of the mercenary, hypocritical, and brutal character of the British trade in indentured Indian workers. As Elleke Boehmer has shown, however, in the passport-free age of the turn of the last century, it was possible for some Indians not only to circulate in elite environments in England but also to be received on occasion in a spirit of equality.16 The multi-national character of citizenship in Great Britain itself helped to enable this perception.17 Nonetheless, the fact that many Indians educated in English public schools and at Oxbridge were groomed to serve as high-level civil servants in India made explicit their subordination within an imperial system. Other checks on assumptions of shared citizenship were also manifest. Boehmer mentions one of the best known of these, namely Mohandas Gandhi’s disappointment in 1906 and again in 1909 when he arrived in London as “part of two deputations to protest directly to the imperial government” against segregationist legislation directed against Indian migrants by the white minority government in South Africa (162). British-Indian influence operated in both directions. Gauri Viswanathan, Joy Dixon, Leela Gandhi, and Ruth Livesey among others have argued that dissident writers such as Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Edward Carpenter, and George Bernard Shaw drew on Hindu spirituality to overcome the limitations of British empiricism.18 In the 1880s and 1890s, Indian wisdom provided Ethical Socialists in Britain with an important motive in their efforts to transform the culture of industrial and commercial capitalism. The action of Ghosh’s novel begins, so to speak, in 1903 when Hamilton bought land in the tide country of the Sundarban archipelago east of Calcutta19 in order to found a utopian community of lower-caste Indians. In fact, however, the process began even earlier, when as a young man he gained control of the Calcutta ticket office of the P and O shipping line, a position that enabled Hamilton, as a character in the novel observes, to become “one of the richest men in India, …in other words, … a monopolikapitalist.”20 Under the influence of both the cooperative movement and Ethical Socialism in Britain, however, Hamilton determined to establish a communitarian estate in the unsettled islands of the Sundarbans. Ghosh links this project of benevolent imperialism with the later aspirations of bourgeois Indian nationalists: “What S’Daniel wanted was to build a new society, a new kind of country. It would be a country run by cooperatives, he said. Here people wouldn’t exploit each other and everyone would have a share in the land. S’Daniel spoke with Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Thakur and many other bujwa nationalists. The bourgeoisie all agreed with S’Daniel that this place could be a model for all of India; it could be a new kind of country” (45). The speaker of these lines, Nirmal Bose, in 1970 utters these words to his wife Nilima’s nephew from Calcutta, young Kanai Dutt.

210  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh A member of the generation of young Indian intellectuals present at the founding of the state of India in 1947, in his role as headmaster of the high school at Lusibari, Nirmal is also in a direct genealogical line with Hamilton. Ghosh patterns the school on the one that Hamilton founded at his estate at Gosaba. Nirmal interprets Hamilton in the terms of John Ruskin, Karl Marx, and William Morris: “What Hamilton wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty social distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women would be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening” (46). Nirmal’s view of this ideal is at once sympathetic and condescending. As a young man in the late 1940s, his socialism had been inspired by the state socialism that he and other young intellectuals perceived in the material advances of the Soviet Union. In a fateful action, he participated in the conference of the Socialist International held in Calcutta in 1948. “This conference was one of the pivotal events of the postwar world: within a decade or two, Western intelligence agencies and their clients were to trace every major Asian uprising—the Vietnamese insurrection, the Malayan insurgency, the Red Flag rebellion in Burma and much else—to the policy of ‘armed struggle’ adopted in Calcutta” (65). This direction was very much in line with Vladimir Lenin’s argument to Russian democratic socialists in his pamphlet, What Is To Be Done?, in 1902 that Left intellectuals needed to persuade what he referred to as “the masses” of the need for revolutionary action that would deliver the state into the hands of the party leadership. 21 Although regional governments in India had gained a great deal of autonomy by the start of World War II, the goal of achieving the status of India as a dominion within the British Commonwealth was postponed as a result of the onset of the War.22 When full-scale national independence was declared in 1947, the results proved to be catastrophic for Nirmal, at the time a promising young writer and left-wing intellectual. Ghosh’s political and religious views are moderate, but it is obvious that he sees the advent of the Western concept of the nation-state as having been disastrous in its impacts on India and Pakistan. As well, he shows no sympathy for Hindu nationalism. In the novel, he projects this view into the characterization of Nirmal, who is subjected to repeated psychical divisions at the time of independence. First of all, the partition separates him from his Muslim family in the new state of Pakistan. Second, during the same period, he falls in love with his future wife, Nilima, whose Hindu family have long successfully inhabited a thoroughly Indo-British cultural ecology. Nilima’s grandfather was a founding member of the Congress Party, and her father practiced as a barrister in the High Court at Calcutta.

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  211 Because Nilima’s family is opposed to the pair’s marriage, they are forced to wed in a civil ceremony in 1949. Almost immediately thereafter, Nirmal experiences another shock when he is held for questioning by police who are interested in gathering information concerning delegates to the previous year’s conference. Although held “for only a day or two” (65), his detention triggers a fall into a major depression upon his release. In Nilima’s words, “something had snapped” (65). In response, Nirmal’s political friends and Nilima’s family eventually conclude that it would be best if Nirmal could be found a sinecure out of the line of political fire. As a trustee of the Hamilton Estate, Nilima’s father arranges for Nirmal to be appointed head of the school in Lusibari. He and his wife spend the rest of their lives living and working on the island. The shift from cosmopolitan to nationalist concepts of elite citizenship among Bengalis occurred long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The same P and O ships in which Britons and Indians at times enjoyed social and intellectual exchanges as equals also served as sites of nationalist identity-formation. For instance, Gandhi wrote his most important political treatise, Hind Swaraj, on shipboard returning to South Africa from London in 1909. Transnational friendships such as the one that grew between political activists such as Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) and Swami Vivekanada provided loci for innovative nationalist and religious thinking. Noble, for example, became a devotee of a Hinduism animated by the universalizing spirit that Victorian philologists believed that they had discovered while translating the Sanskrit classics into English, translations that in turn communicated this belief to Bengali intellectuals, who were introduced to the sagas by way of English translations. 23 As an advocate for Indian independence, Noble also became a major figure in promoting the veneration of the warrior-goddess Kali. As the figure of “Mother India,” Kali became the patron of the insurgent heterosexual masculinity that Noble demanded of young male Indian nationalists. “I have identified myself with the Idea of Mother India,” Noble wrote. “I have become the idea itself” (quoted in Boehmer, 91). During the first generation of Lusibari’s existence, Hamilton invested heavily in building and maintaining dikes to protect the newly cleared farmland from tidal surges. Modern electricity and the telephone were introduced, and by means of available credit settlers were freed from their subjection to local moneylenders or Mahajans. By the year of George V’s silver jubilee in 1935, the trust had established “a network of co-operative societies and primary schools” across twenty-five villages in the settlement. Mahadev Desai reports the existence at the time of “a prosperous peasantry with their own homes and fields and garden plots, with their co-operative credit societies and store and schools and dispensaries.”24

212  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh After Hamilton’s death in 1939, however, matters deteriorated. His nephew and heir, James Hamilton, who lived on the isle of Arran off the coast of Scotland, delegated the management of the estate to local administrators who bullied the peasants while diverting to their personal use funds intended for maintenance and capital investments. By the time that Nirmal and Nilima moved there in 1950, the estate was in ruins. “Hunger and catastrophe” had become “a way of life” (67). The next generation was spent in repairing the damage and re-founding the estate. Writing in the 1930s, Desai had already pointed out need for financial reforms. In his view, the estate levied too high a tax on settlers’ produce; and interest rates on loans, though lower than those charged by Mahajans, still left the farmers in debt. Desai also called for the introduction of profit-sharing among workers (6, 7); and he urged Hamilton, who had no direct heirs, to “create a trust of the Estate” (7) that would enable co-op members finally to achieve economic independence. It is under Nilima, who succeeds in reorganizing the ownership of Lusibari in the form of the non-profit Badoban Development Trust (69), that these goals are later achieved. She also organizes a successful Women’s Union and builds a well-equipped modern hospital. Nirmal, for his part, does less well. Overcome by despondency at the destitution he encounters upon arriving at Lusibari, he responds by repeatedly re-reading What Is To Be Done? However, the absence of an industrial proletariat in the settlement leaves Nirmal “read[ing] and reread[ing] Lenin’s pamphlet without being able to find any definite answers” (67). 25 Unable to adapt Lenin’s direction to actual circumstances, Nirmal makes the mistake of undervaluing his own work at the school. At the same time, he is still enough of a Marxist to depreciate his wife’s successful endeavors as forms of “social service” (69) that fall far short of revolution. In 1979, however, a genuinely revolutionary moment arrives when Nirmal becomes involved as an observer of the Morichjhãpi experiment, i.e., the spontaneous takeover by landless peasants of the Sundarban island of Morichjhãpi (100). 26 For many years, opposition members of Leftist political parties in West Bengal had supported the relocation to the Sundarbans of a large population of lower-caste Bengali Hindus displaced as a result of the Partition of 1947. But once this populist migration began, the new Left Front government opposed it on economic and political grounds. In May, 1979, after a harsh attempt to impose an embargo on the settlers failed, they were forcibly removed. Nirmal, recovering at last his ability to write, serves as witness both to the spontaneous utopian commonwealth that comes into being on the island early in the year and to the paranoia and distrust that arise once the government begins to tighten the screws.

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  213 In part, Nirmal’s motivation is personal since he has long been emotionally entangled at a distance with Kusum, a charismatic and fearless Dalit who as a youngster had lived with her mother at Lusibari and who later returns to the area as a young adult along with her young son, Fokirchand Mandol, in order to help build a new community at Morichjhãpi. Immediately before the final catastrophe, Nirmal quickly fills a notebook with an account of the settlement effort. He dedicates the notebook to Kanai, whom he remembers as a boy of ten who had developed a friendship with Kusum during a brief visit to the island. Nirmal hopes that Kanai’s fondness for Kusum may motivate him to preserve and disseminate the text. For Kanai, Kusum becomes a lifelong touchstone of desire after an accidental touch at their last meeting prompts the boy’s first self-conscious awareness of opposite-sex attraction. Intimacy figures in the provenance of the text in another way as well: Horen Naskor, the boatman who preserves the manuscript after Nirmal’s death, took Kusum under his protection as a child after her widowed mother was abducted into sexual slavery on the mainland. Following Kusum’s death in “the massacre at Morichjhãpi” (102), Horen also effectively adopts Fokir. The preceding pages provide an account of how a progressive late Victorian movement made a mark on the Sundarbans both under the Raj and following Indian independence. They also indicate how a universalizing and equalizing late Victorian Hindu spirit helped shape British dissident culture at the end of the nineteenth century. This interfusion, which I call cosmopolitan, may also be termed ecological, a word with important reverberations in view of the tenuous ecology of the tidelands. In an afterword, Ghosh reveals that these connections are deeply personal since his “uncle, the late Shri Satish Chandra Ghosh, was for more than a decade the headmaster of the Rural Reconstruction Institute, the high school founded by Sir Daniel Hamilton in Gosaba. For some years before his untimely death, in 1967, he was also the manager of the Hamilton Estate.” To his uncle and his first cousin, Subroto Ghosh, Ghosh writes that he is “greatly beholden for my earliest linkages of memory with the tide country” (331). If, then, Nirmal’s fictional notebook attempts to conserve an archive of political and personal memory, the ecological work of the novel likewise serves as a reminder of how significant a bred-in the bone transnational cosmopolitanism can be. In the contemporary frame of the novel, Ghosh adapts to his purposes the historical typology that Georg Lukács developed in his writing in Moscow in the 1930s. Beginning with the Scottish historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, Lukács argues in The Historical Novel that realist novelists of the nineteenth century dramatized the social, ideological, and economic tensions created as pre-capitalist forms of social organization came under pressure as a result of the development of mercantile

214  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh capitalism. 27 In Waverley (1814), the first of these novels, the young protagonist, Edward Waverley, is caught in conflicting loyalties between his English background and his love for the Jacobite-leaning Scottish uncle who raised him. When the Jacobite Rebellion breaks out in 1745, Waverley, although an officer within the British army, finds himself drawn to support the Roman Catholic Stuart and Highland rebels against the Crown. Provided a providential pardon by a British general after the revolt is put down, Waverley settles down to marriage and what is described at the end of the novel as “dulce domum” (Chapter 70). Similarly, in Old Mortality (1816), Scott demonstrates how the extreme Calvinism of Scottish Covenanters needed to be suppressed in the interest of the unification of Scotland and England achieved in the Acts of Union of 1707. 28 Waverley and Henry Morton, the young protagonist of Old Mortality, are both faced with a dialectical challenge: namely, to pledge loyalty to the outmoded allegiances of the feudal past or to adjust to the economic and political requirements of a united kingdom. In choosing the latter, both men, in Lukács’s view, choose modernity over the past. A comparable shift occurs in The Hungry Tide in the relation between Piya and the fisherman, Fokir. As the addressee of Nirmal’s missive, Kanai may be taken to exemplify the cosmopolitan second-generation subject of the Indian nation-state. Unburdened by his uncle’s disillusionment, he has achieved professional and entrepreneurial success as the principal of a firm that provides translation services for international agencies dealing with government officials in New Delhi. In this role, Kanai exemplifies the post-colonial success of elite males in the new India. And, indeed, professionally and ethically his goal has been to achieve cognitive transparency in translating from one language to another. To a reader familiar with post-colonial studies, Kanai is likely to be read as an example of Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern subject or Homi Bhabha’s subject of mimicry, whose subjectivity is emptied out in service of a globalizing ideology. 29 The aptness of this reading is reinforced by Kanai’s experience of being repeatedly abused verbally by dissatisfied clients. That such treatment betokens the existence of something like a global caste system is suggested in Kanai’s own violent outburst against Fokir late in the novel when the safety of both men is endangered by an approaching cyclone. Kanai’s bad behavior on this occasion expresses a casually masked but deep-seated prejudice against lower-caste Indians. Similarly, Kanai’s sexual chauvinism (any possibly available attractive woman is fair game) illustrates his attempted imitation of what he takes to be the sexual and social freedoms enjoyed by bourgeois Western males. In this regard, Kanai considers himself to be freed of the restraint required of male Indians by the norms of their extended families. These shortcomings suggest Kanai’s unsuitability to play the role of the “middling” (Anderson, 24) hero

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  215 within a narrative of dialectical progress. In this perspective, Kanai’s embrace of widening opportunities has come at the price of a diminished, even trivialized, humanity. Instead, the Bengali of the future, so to speak, may be glimpsed in Roy, a member of the second postcolonial generation. Piya has escaped the traps into which her parents, first-generation emigrants, were caught. Determined to take advantage of the possibilities of economic and social advancement in the United States, Piya’s father has deliberately suppressed his Indian background. In contrast, her mother, a stayat-home housewife, succumbed to despondency in the absence of a circle of female domestic intimacy. Piya for her part has grown up to become a deracinated cosmopolite, whose first-rate education at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has enabled her to pursue field work in the Mekong delta on the topic of the Orcaella brevirostris or river dolphin. A further grant to study members of this unusual species in West Bengal has now taken her back, quite incidentally, to the country of her parents’ birth. By the end of the novel, she has amassed a body of original field research that enables her to choose to continue to base her research in the Sundarbans. Her life at Lusibari, moreover, will also make possible engagements in relationship and community-building with Nilima and her successors at the Trust. Sketching this path forward for Piya, Ghosh has imagined a benign international cosmopolitanism in which American higher education plays a defining role. This perspective elides the catastrophic effects of continual U.S. military incursions in Asia and elsewhere since the end of World War II as well as the devastating impacts of international finance on the global economy early in the twenty-first century. Ghosh, however, is speaking in part from his experience as a student at Oxford, his later residence in New York, and his academic appointments in the United States. The prospect thereby afforded is very different from the backdrop of human catastrophe at Morichjhãpi that Nirmal records, a disaster for which both populist Leftist political parties in Bengal and international wildlife protection agencies bear a measure of responsibility.30 In the book’s epilogue, it is international reconstruction that Ghosh chooses to emphasize not destruction. If Piya is identified with contemporary progress, Fokir is identified with a receding past. In a discursive passage, Ghosh writes that the inhabitants of Lusibari are transplanted peasants who have been unable to adjust to the unique challenges posed by the Sundarbans’ hazardous environment. As a result, young fishermen invariably die young. Already at the beginning of the novel, Fokir’s days, statistically speaking, are numbered. His marginality is evident in the tensions evident in his marriage to Moyna, a member of a Scheduled Caste who in contrast is absorbed in the opportunities that will become possible for her at the community hospital once she is able to complete training there and

216  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh become “a fully fledged nurse” (107), an ambition that had earlier appeared to be foreclosed as a result of her arranged marriage to Fokir. Kanai, who has a sexual interest in Moyna, associates her with his own desire for self-improvement: “Her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning: it was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world” (112). ­Kanai regards Moyna as deeply devoted to her husband but believes that the pair have little in common. In Kanai’s view, “this made it seem all the more unfortunate that someone with Moyna’s talents should be held back by a husband who could not keep up” (112). Ghosh, however, does not leave matters here. In a break with Lukàcs’s model, Ghosh in fact affiliates Fokir with modernity even more effectively than Moyna. It turns out that the English-less fisher is a gifted naturalist in the Enlightenment (and Victorian) mode of the natural philosopher whose findings are based primarily on acute, prolonged observation.31 In searching for good sites for crab-fishing, Fokir has in fact identified the location of the region’s fugitive population of river dolphins, the object of Piya’s research.32 On his final trip with her, as a cyclone approaches, he canvases these sites with her. Although he dies while protecting her from the full force of the storm, the information that he has shared becomes a mine of data, registered on the GPS device that she is carrying with her. This new knowledge provides Piya with material on the basis of which she can secure research funding that will allow her to remain at Lusibari. Fokir’s knowledge, his dedication to Piya (he twice saves her life in the course of the novel), even his wisdom, cut both ways, enlisting him in the work of modernity despite the fact that the storage capacity of the GPS locator has rendered his personal know-how redundant. The narrative trajectory to this point, however, is only one through line in the novel. Question remains as to how heterogeneous elements stand in relation to this narrative of progress, devotion, and loss. One such element is the ecological threnody of the novel. Another is the celebration of animist religious experience. A third element is a modernist emphasis on fragmentation and collage as literary form as well as the work ’s apocalypticism, which functions in a number of different registers including Nirmal’s frequent citations from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. All of these elements combine in The Hungry Tide. Perry Anderson argues that catastrophe is a defining term of the genre of the postmodern historical novel. If for Scott the consolidation of the modern nation-state was the telos of the historical novel, for the postcolonial author of historical fiction the moment of origin of the contemporary nation-state is liable to be one of irrecuperable damage. Throughout his career, Ghosh has taken the date of Partition, August 15, 1947, to be one such a moment. He shares this perspective with Salman Rushdie,

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  217 author of Midnight’s Children (1981), an important intertext of Ghosh’s novel.33 Both works focus on a key instance of state violence: for Ghosh, Morichjhãpi; for Rushdie, the clearance of the Jama Masjid slum. These incidents testify to the disunification, psychical and social, of the postcolonial state. Both novels focus on members of generations that are born or come of age at the inauguration of the modern states of India and Pakistan. Both authors complement conventional narration with passages that re-imagine their protagonists’ experience in terms of Indian mythography. And both choose the Sundarban region as a space in which both individual and, more generally, Indo-Pakistani and Bengali culture have the potential to be re-integrated. In this way, catastrophe may be sublated although both novels remain open to sharply contradictory possibilities and in particular to the prospect of large-scale disruption of human life, which is already being experienced on the Bangladeshi plain as a result of the effects of the environmental crisis. As the title of the novel and its part divisions suggest, the Sundarbans as geographical, historical, and mental space are highly unstable with a strong entropic pull. Conditions in the Sundarbans in terms of continual tidal ebb and flow, ongoing island formation and subsidence, continually shifting channels and sandbars, and highly variable—at times extreme—weather conditions underscore the sense that the humans who dwell here are both exposed and out of place. Ironically, the ever more obvious evidence of the damaging impact of a changing climate in the years since the publication of the novel makes its picture of human existence yet more precarious. Nirmal records in the notebook a conversation that he has with Fokir, at the time five years of age, when his mother returns to Lusibari to seek medical supplies on behalf of the settlers at Morichjhãpi. After Fokir draws Nirmal’s attention to the bãdh or embankment that protects the settlement, he replies: “the bãdh is not just the guarantor of human life on our island; it is also our abacus and archive, our library of stories” (168). Turning, Nirmal points out the scars on the surface of the earthwork that witness to earlier stresses, failures, and resulting inundations. One prominent feature marks the effects of a disastrous storm that struck in the 1930s, early in the history of the settlement. Imagine, Fokir,” I said. “Imagine the lives of your ancestors. They were new to this island, freshly arrived in the tide country. After years of struggle they had managed to create the foundations of the bãdh; they had even managed to grow a few handfuls of rice and vegetables. After years of living on stilt-raised platforms, they had finally been able to descend to earth and make a few shacks and shanties on level ground. All this by virtue of the bãdh. And imagine that fateful night when the storm struck, at exactly the time that a kotal gan [an exceptionally high tide] was setting in; imagine

218  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh how they cowered in their roofless huts and watched the waters rising, rising, gnawing at the mud and the sand they had laid down to hold the river off. Imagine what went through their heads as they watched this devouring tide eating its way through the earthworks, stalking them wherever they were. There was not one among them, I will guarantee you, my young friend, who would not rather have stood before a tiger than have looked into the maws of that tide.” (169) Listening to this and additional accounts of yet more devastating events such as the cyclone and earthquake that simultaneously struck Calcutta in October, 1737, Fokir seeks reassurance: “But Saar, it couldn’t happen again, Saar could it?” Nirmal thinks: “I could see Fokir was trying to gauge the appetite of our rivers and I would have liked to put his young mind at rest. But I knew also that it would have been wrong to deceive him. ‘My friend, not only could it happen again—it will happen again. A storm will come, the waters will rise, and the bãdh will succumb, in part or in whole. It is only a matter of time.”” “How do you know, Saar?” Fokir asks: “Look at it, my friend, look at the bãdh. See how frail it is, how fragile. Look at the waters that flow past it and how limitless they are, how patient, how quietly they bide their time. Just to look at it is to know why the waters must prevail, later if not sooner. But if you’re not convinced by the evidence of your eyes, then perhaps you will have to use your ears” (171). At this point, Nirmal draws the boy’s attention to the “scratching sound” that one can hear if one puts one’s ear to the side of the bãdh. Puzzled at first, the boy finally realizes that he is hearing crabs burrowing in the embankment. “Yes, Fokir,” replies his instructor, “even as we stand here, untold multitudes of crabs are burrowing into our bãdh. Now ask yourself: how long can this frail fence last against these monstrous appetites—the crabs and the tides, the winds and the storms? And if it falls, who shall we turn to then, comrade?” (172). In this conversation, Fokir learns that the earth’s surface is an archive of signs of past disasters, a fact that implies in turn a continual process of destruction and rebuilding with no assurance that the creatures whose subterranean workings continually undermine the embankment will not carry the day. Nirmal’s long exchange with Fokir operates as a scene of instruction, first of all for the reader who may be unaware of Ghosh’s background in archeology and social anthropology. The passage illustrates how Ghosh reads signs of past events as items in an archive whose subject is ecological and human history. While these data are crucial, the huge gaps within them require logical thought to be supplemented by imaginative projection. In diegetic terms, the exchange between boy and teacher makes clear that Fokir’s later mastery of the marine environment is not

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  219 to be explained primarily in terms of folk knowledge or the unusually sharp senses that are hypothetically his by virtue of being a ‘primitive.’ In the scene, Nirmal introduces Fokir to the power of a scientific outlook, a power that Fokir will seek to make his own in a lifelong albeit unschooled engagement with the world around him. Fokir’s meeting with Nirmal demonstrates many kinds of time that fascinate Ghosh, one of them being the time of communal self-fashioning. At Lusibari, these terms have been determined by global movements of capital and a late-Victorian cosmopolitanism which are but two of the many effects of imperial reach. The history of Ethical Socialism is only one strand in the large, complex history of an idea that, for Nirmal and other nationalists of his generation, is the history of socialism. Nirmal underscores this point by introducing, likely for the first time to Fokir’s hearing, the names of Karl Marx and the Reading Room of the British Museum where Marx wrote Das Kapital (171). Moreover, Nirmal enlists the boy in this project by repeatedly addressing him as “comrade.” In a liberal postcolonial mutation, this ideal continues to the end of the novel in the action of Piya, who reclaims her Indian nationality in order to locate her future research at Lusibari, a commitment that enables her in turn to secure the capital necessary to sustain Lusibari after Nilima’s eventual retirement. On the personal level, Piya also fashions for herself a kind of secular Holy Family with Moyna as her principal research assistant together with Tutul, Moyna and Fokir’s young son. Following the death of Nirmal, Piya is joined with Moyna and Nilima by what may be termed social desire: a desire shared in common among the three now single women to work together in order to foster the Trust in the face of whatever challenges may await. On occasion in the novel, time functions as an abstract marker of process. But Ghosh also understands time as event, implying that the moment can be of inherent significance.34 The preferential use of event by Alain Badiou and others introduces a post-Christian register of signification.35 Event in this sense is transformative in a way that recalls figurations of the moment in classic modernist texts.36 Hence Nirmal’s frequent citations from Rilke, for example, the statement: “Life is lived in transformation” (187). Ghosh provides a key instance of time in this sense in Kanai’s experience late in the novel on the uninhabited island of Garjontola. Beside himself after a humiliating fall in the mud and having ordered Fokir to leave him, Kanai becomes terrified when he either hallucinates or actually encounters a fully grown tiger. This extremity plus Piya’s near escape from death in the storm and Fokir’s act of self-sacrifice on her behalf result in the transformation of both Piya’s and Kanai’s lives. Leaving his business behind him at least for now, Kanai first moves from New Delhi to Kolkata, then the further distance to Lusibari, where he remains in order to reconstruct the now missing notebook, which he

220  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh alone has read. To his own surprise, Kanai finds himself resuming his uncle’s thwarted vocation as a revolutionary writer. The Dickensian extremity that overtakes the characters at the end of the novel exceeds the limits of both melodrama and the political compromises that have enabled Nilima to make modest but crucial progress at Lusibari.37 Yes, Piya has science; and Kanai has modern languages. But the local inhabitants have additional resources in the cult of the tideland goddess, Bon Bibi, whom Nilima refers to as “the savior of the weak and a mother of mercy to the poor” (86). 38 Bon Bibi is a shape and gender-shifting syncretic figure of veneration that draws upon divinities not only in Hindu and Muslim but also Catholic and classical Greek and Latin tradition. In her avatars, Bon Bibi is available to Kanai and Fokir in their boyhoods; to an intellectual such as Nirmal in interpreting the Sundarbans; to Kusum’s father, who fell victim to attack by a tiger; and to Kusum, who throughout her life places herself under the protection of the goddess. Indeed, in her heroic role as a Dalit leader of the settlers at Morichjhãpi, Kusum might herself be taken to be an avatar of the goddess.39 In light of the wonders and miracles that occur in postcolonial fictions such as The Hungry Tide and Midnight’s Children, it is worth keeping in mind that Ghosh offers a hermeneutical key for reading the marvelous in Nirmal’s account of how he would like to teach Hindu and Muslim myth to children at Morichjhãpi. He uses as an example the story of Vishnu, in his incarnation as a divine dwarf, measuring out the universe in three giant strides. I would tell [the children] about the god’s misstep and how an errant toenail on one of his feet created a tiny scratch on the fabric of creation [that today we know as a sub-oceanic trench that greatly extends the length of the river Ganges]. It was this pore, I’d tell them, that became the source of the immortal and eternal Ganga that flows through the heavens, washing away the sins of the universe—this was the stream that would become the greatest of all the earth’s rivers. (150) In other words, Nirmal will teach the founding myths of the great religions as rational allegories. In this way too Ghosh draws the mythological time of Muslim and Hindu belief into rational discourse.40 Fictional time in Nirmal is the time of scientific knowledge, including both the almost unimaginably long times of geological and climatic change plus the accelerated “tick, tock”41 of contemporary environmental change. In the 15 years since the publication of The Hungry Tide, the “tick, tock,” has become louder—and Ghosh has found himself turning from the rationalism of a Nirmal to a newfound appreciation of the limits of human freedom and the need to bring a religious consciousness to

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  221 bear on the magnitude of the crisis.42 Ghosh’s intensified concern in the face of the increasing pace of climate change has resulted in a shift from the genre of the postcolonial novel to such genres as the public lecture, prophecy, and apocalypse. The shift reflects a repudiation, at least for the moment, of the contemporary novel on account of its failure to reckon with what Ghosh refers to as the “Great Derangement,” a period similar to the 1930s when democratically elected governments failed to respond adequately to the dangers posed by Fascist regimes and Soviet Communism. Ghosh attacks the contemporary novel, its authors, publishers, reviewers, and consumers for having in effect provided alibis for those who have failed to recognize and respond in the face of what he sees as the greatest challenge to human and other living creatures today. In The Great Derangement, a series of lectures published with ample documentation in 2016, Ghosh substitutes an apocalyptic narrative structure for the qualified optimism of The Hungry Tide. For Ghosh in The Great Derangement, the question is not whether New York City will disappear from the map but when. In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.43 In the brilliant polemic with which the lectures end, Ghosh contrasts the rhetoric of the United Nations’ 2015 Agreement on Climate Change, in effect a place holder for the affected governmental and corporate agencies, to Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s prophetic encyclical on the environment of the same year (195 n. 50). Ghosh argues that the main practical objective of the Agreement was to secure the signatories relief from legal liabilities arising from their failure to take significant coordinated action in order to slow the accelerating environmental catastrophe. Ghosh quotes: “The Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.” In response, he observes: “With these words the Agreement forever strips the victims of climate change of all possible claims to legal recompense for their losses” (158). In contrast to the positive steps to which signatories appeared to be committing themselves in 2015, the Agreement in fact deferred joint action by five years until 2020,

222  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh much too late a date if the parties were to have any hope of reaching the “aspirational goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade” (153). In contrast, Laudato Si’ calls for immediate action. Emphasizing the suffering and dislocation already being imposed on impoverished populations in places such as Northeastern India and Bangladesh, Francis’s text repeatedly links the words poverty and justice. He writes: “A true ecological debt exists, particularly between the global north and south.”44 In contrast, as Ghosh points out, the authors of the Agreement use the word “justice” only once—and then in a dismissive context (158).

Notes 1 Citing Louis Dumont, De Certeau writes that a “process of coexistence and reabsorption is the ‘cardinal fact’ of Indian history.” In India, “‘new forms [of temporality] never drive the older ones away’” (de Certeau, The Writing of History, 4). 2 Ghosh is a dual citizen of India and the United States, where he currently lives. As the following pages show, however, the close connections between his family history and the history of modern India as well as his years in anglophile schooling in India and, later, his doctoral studies in anthropology at Oxford University make him a suitable candidate for inclusion in this study. 3 Ghosh has written: “The environment is the critical issue for our times: for writers of my generation it is what fascism and communism were for the writers of the thirties. Twenty years from now our children are going to ask us where we stood in regard to this issue and what we did about it. No one can afford to be disengaged from it” (Ghosh, “In Conversation,” 26). See also Kooria, “Between the Walls of Archives,” 16. 4 Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene 1”; Nixon, “Anthropocene 2.” 5 A range of possible definitions for the term was discussed at the conference, “Victorian Ecotime: Inventing, Forecasting, Temporalizing,” Graduate Center, City University of New York, May 4, 2018. On historical deforestation, see Grove, Green Imperialism. 6 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 331. Subsequent page references to Ghosh in the text and notes unless otherwise cited are to this novel. 7 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 258—hereafter cited in notes as Jay. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 67–68; White, Metahistory, 417–418. 8 Jay. 9 Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 92.





Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  223 15 16 17 18

Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 231–241. Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 34–124. Cf. Young. Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism; Dixon, Divine Feminine; Ghandi. Affective Communities; and Viswanathan, Outside the Fold. 19 I follow Ghosh’s spelling of the name. 20 Ghosh, 42. 21 Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, in Essential Works, 72–92. 22 Reynolds, The Long Shadow, 115–116. 23 Boehmer, 35, 39, 52–53, 54, 57. 24 Desai, “Daniel Hamilton: Pioneer of Co-operative Movement in India,” 3. 25 Similarly, in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the narrator’s grandfather, Dr. Aadam Aziz has similarly found himself befuddled by Lenin’s plan of action (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 14). 26 The significance of “spontaneity” in popular uprisings is a major concern of Lenin in What Is To Be Done? (72–92). 27 Anderson, “From Progress to Catastrophe.” 28 See the entries on Waverley and Old Mortality in the Walter Scott Digital Library (University of Edinburgh). 29 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 85–92; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 30 Ghosh, 98–99. The settlers chose to colonize an uninhabited island that the state government had set aside as a preserve for the Bengal tiger. 31 As in the case of John Ruskin’s meteorological and geological observations. 32 See “Indus River Dolphins in Pakistan” and, closer to home, Malkin, “Earth’s Smallest Porpoise Slips Closer to Extinction.” 33 See Clifford’s comment on Ghosh’s first novel, Shadow Lines (1988), 26. 34 See Chapter 4. 35 Despite her secular point of view, Hannah Arendt shares a similar concept of event, which, drawing on the precedent of Jesus’s acts in the Gospels, she regards as miracles of human existence: “For Arendt, ‘freedom’ in its highest form was the ability to act deliberately and spontaneously, to break out of the automatic processes of daily life and initiate new and unforeseen events in the world. Miracles, actions that actually defy nature, capture the essence of this” (See John Thomason, “Miracle Workers”19–20). 36 Ibid. 37 Think of Eugene Wrayburn, the roguish flaneur who is transformed as a result of his rescue from near drowning late in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. 38 Dutta, “Maa Bonbibi in the Land of Tigers.” 39 Piya too, in her dedication to the preservation of river dolphins, a species closely associated with the cult of Bon Bibi, might be thought of as a latterday priestess of the deity. 40 This adaptation of mythology in a modernist discourse is typical of the ­approach of artists of the founding generation of the 1947 state (Zehra ­Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan, The Progressive Revolution). 41 A phrase favored by Rushdie (118). 42 In the years since Ghosh’s lectures, the projected speed and intensity of global warming has worsened. See Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth and McKibben, Falter. 43 Ghosh, 11. Subsequent page references to The Great Derangement appear in the text. 4 4 Ghosh quotes Francis, 157–158.

224  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh

Bibliography Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001. Anderson, Kevin. The Hidden Agenda: How Veiled Techno-Utopias Shore Up the Paris Agreement. http//kevinanderson. Info/blog/the-hidden-agenda-how veiled-techno-utopias-shore-up-the-paris-agreement. Anderson, Perry. “From Progress to Catastrophe.” London Review of Books, July 28, 2011, 24–28. Bandyopadhyay, Alapan, and Anup Matilal, jt. eds. The Philosopher’s Stone: Speeches and Writings of Sir Daniel Hamilton. Calcutta: Sir Daniel Hamilton Estate Trust, 2003. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Boehmer, Elleke. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2020. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Anthropocene 1.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2017. Pp. 39–42. Chambers, Claire. “Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land.” Postcolonial Text, 2.3 (2006): 1–19. Clifford, James. “Looking for Bomma.” London Review of Books, March 24, 1994, 26–27. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Ed. Jan van der Dussen. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994. “COP21: Paris Deal Far Too Weak to Prevent Devastating Climate Change, Academics Warn.” The Independent, January 8, 2016. de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988. Desai, Mahadev. “Daniel Hamilton: Pioneer of Co-operative Movement in India.” https://www.facebook.com/notes/nachiketa-desai/daniel-hamilton-pioneer-ofco-operative-movement-in-india/406731679441292/ Dixon, Joy. Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001. Dumont, Louis. “Le Problème de l’histoire.” In La Civilisation indienne et nous. Paris: Colin, Coll. Cahiers des Annales, 1964. Dutta, Kalpita. “Maa Bonbibi in the Land of Tigers.” Infochange India, June, 2011. www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie= UTF-8#q=infochange%20India Encyclical Letter Laudato Sí of the Holy Father Francis on Care of Our Common Home. https:/ /laudatosi.com/watch Framework Convention on Climate Change (hereafter Agreement). http:// unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/lo9.pdf Ghandi. Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangment: Climage Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017. ———. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh  225 ———. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. ———. “In Conversation with Tapan Kumar Ghosh and Makarand R. Paranjape.” In In Pursuit of Amitav Ghosh: Some Recent Readings, ed. Tapan Kumar Ghosh and Prasanta Bhattacharya. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2013. ———. River of Smoke. London: John Murray, 2011. ———. Sea of Poppies. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008. Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: ­Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995. Halbertal, Moshe. Maimonides: Life and Thought. Trans. Joel Linsider. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014. “Indus River Dolphins in Pakistan.” http://us.whales.org/case-study/indusriver-dolphins-in-pakistan Jumabhoy, Zehra, and Boon Hui Tan. The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art in a New India. New York: Asia Society Museum, 2019. Kooria, Mahmood. “Between the Walls of Archives and Horizons of Imagination: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” Itinerario, 36 (December 2012): 7–18. Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith and introd. Daniel Lagache. New York: Norton, 1973. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “What Is To Be Done?” In Essential Works, ed. and introd. Henry M. Christman. New York: Dover Publications, 1987. Pp. 53–175. Lionnet, Françoise. “Shipwrecks, Slavery, and the Challenge of Global Comparison: From Fiction to Archive in the Colonial Indian Ocean.” Comparative Literature, 64.4 (2012): 446–461. ———. “World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Coolie Odysseys: The Case of J.M. G Le Clézio’s and Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean Novels.” Unpublished Essay. Livesey, Ruth. Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. Malkin, Elisabeth. “Earth’s Smallest Porpoise Slips Closer to Extinction: Nets Snare Vaquitas Despite Mexican Patrols.” New York Times, Monday, May 16, 2016, A5. McKibben, Bill. Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? New York: Henry Holt, 2019. Nixon, Rob. “Anthropocene 2.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2017. Pp. 43–46. Reynolds, David. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 2014. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2006. Scott, Sir Walter. Waverley. Ed. Andrew Hook. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Shell, Marc. Islandology: Geography, Rhetoric, Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2014. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, jt. ed. and introd. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988. Pp. 271–313.

226  Ecological Time and Social Desire in Ghosh Thomason, John. “Miracle Workers: What the Resistance Can Still Learn from Arendt.” Commonweal, 146.11 (June 14, 2019): 16–20. Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998. Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019. Walter Scott Digital Library. University of Edinburgh. www.walterscott.lib. ed.ac.uk/works/novels/waverley.html; www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/ novels/mortality.html White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973. Young, Robert, J. C. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

10 Male Homoerotics in the Metamodernist Fictions of Alan Hollinghurst

In the opening pages of Henry James Goes to Paris, Peter Brooks ­discusses the meeting of Henry James and Roger Fry at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London as described by Virginia Woolf in her biography of Fry.1 At the time, Woolf and her friends recognized James to be “an exemplar of the movement from Victorianism to modernism.”2 James held the view that the objective of the novelist was to attempt to represent “the real.”3 However, in his work of the 1890s and later, he rejected the notion of the author as an objective observer or of representation as objective. This view prompts the question: how can an admittedly subjective point of view convey an adequate sense of reality? In seeking to answer this question, James developed a new method of narration, eschewing “the direct presentation of the story—its characters and its actions—in favor of the play of interpretive consciousness on the action.”4 Woolf takes a similar approach in novels that she published in the 1920s and early 1930s such as To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves. Brooks contends that this view characterizes as well the Cubist works by Picasso that appeared in the Exhibition, works which James himself feared moved too far away from representation toward design. Although not as experimental as Woolf’s, the innovative work of late Victorian and Edwardian writers such as James and Joseph Conrad has continued to be recognized as modernist. In James and Woolf’s writing, the negation of objective third-person narration and the commitment to including the observer in the representation of what is observed became standard aspects of fiction. This epistemological stance has temporal implications. In works of this sort, experience in the present is to the fore, even when the present represented occurs within the past. A challenge remains, however, as to how historical time is to be represented and whether it is to be considered as telic, that is as having shape, meaning, and direction toward possible futures in addition to its significance in the moment of individual experience. Whether historical time is oriented toward future time is a concern of Brooks in his later study, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (2017). There, following Georg Lukács’s account of temporality in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Brooks argues that Flaubert’s disillusion with French

228  Male Homoerotics politics in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 led him to attempt in L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) to represent time as without significance beyond mundaneity. Ditto the biography of Frédéric Moreau, the novel’s directionless male bourgeois protagonist. The problematic character of historical time continues in the metamodern fiction of Alan Hollinghurst.5 In his work as a novelist, Hollinghurst has chosen to take James and Woolf along with other modernists such as Marcel Proust, the camp novelist Ronald Firbank, and Evelyn Waugh as models.6 As well, in a number of novels published between 1988 and 2017, Hollinghurst has provided in fictional form a history of the gradual process by which male (and, to a lesser extent, female) homosexuality have come to be naturalized within England. While these works also trace continuing acts of private and public violence against subjects of same-sex desire, including police entrapment and judicial persecution, they do so in an environment of increasing solidarity among gay men and lesbians and growing public acceptance of same-sex sexual and emotional ties. In this respect, the trajectory of Hollinghurst’s writing from The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) through The Spell (1998) and The Line of Beauty (2004) to The Stanger’s Child (2011) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) tracks the gradual civil and social emancipation of gay individuals.7 In Lukács’s discussion of the invention of the nineteenth-century realist novel by Sir Walter Scott, the successful development of the principal protagonist is represented as being a function of his ability to navigate the change from traditional ways of life to new ones. In Hollinghurst too, individual development occurs within a larger history, one not only of progress as Scott imagined it but in the midst of continuing struggles and at times setbacks among and between members of various groups. Intersecting with these shifts have been others that Lukács would regard as world historical. In England in the twentieth century, the most significant of these has been the decline of the United Kingdom as a global power, a decline which the outcome of the Brexit referendum of 2016 underscores. The post-imperial conditions and consciousness that accompany this reality have resulted in what Paul Gilroy has described as a state of “postcolonial melancholia,” that is, a sense of loss, resentment, and retrenchment that can be destructive not only of institutions but also of individuals and groups who are liable to be defined as outsiders to an integral body politic.8 In a brilliant study, Anna Marie Smith demonstrates how a defensive, self-consciously white, identity was defined in contrast to both gay and lesbian populations—as well as to Britons of African and Afro-Caribbean heritage—between the late 1960s, through the Thatcher years, and into the 1990s. This process cannot be reconciled with the gay liberal trajectory that I describe above. As Smith points out, the two exist in contradiction with one another.

Male Homoerotics  229 There is no historical or metaphysical guarantee of the achievement of full citizenship. The fascination that Hollinghurst shows with cross-racial sexual contacts between black and white men and youths can, however, be put to work in imagining a line of individual and minority progress despite the contested trajectory of national existence. Hollinghurst’s interest in ties of this sort, both now and in the colonial past, establishes points of contact with Gilroy’s approach to similar concerns in light of the history of the migration of black people from Africa and the Caribbean to England following World War II. In Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), which Gilroy wrote in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic invasion of Iraq by American and British armed forces in 2003, he found potential for a successful counter movement in the existence of what he terms “conviviality,” a sexually diverse, metropolitan, cross-class, cross-gender culture.9 Gilroy’s argument continues to be relevant in post-Brexit Britain, but the question as to whether what he describes as a “multiculture” can succeed remains open.10 Nonetheless, the existence of such a culture testifies for Gilroy to the fact that resources do exist to surmount the backward-pulling drag of cultural anxiety among many in England today. This possibility exists despite the fact that it will not be possible to do so without major changes in Parliamentary politics, improved living standards throughout Britain, and the restoration of the nation’s public sector. Hollinghurst’s moral and social critique of the Tory party and its leaders and his evident lack of confidence in Labour as a realistic alternative register his skepticism about the capability of the political class to rise to the occasion.11 The term metamodernism is used to describe the emergence in the late twentieth century of formally modernist literary texts that draw upon the resources of postmodernism, itself a post-World War II tendency in cultural theory and the arts regarding which Linda Hutcheon said in 1989: “it’s over.”12 Metamodernism is doubly reflexive, incorporating not only modernist self-reflexivity but also aspects of postmodern critiques of modernism and modernity. David James and Urmila Seshagiri describe three features of literary metamodernism: first, the stylistic and formal imitation of modernist work; second, the attempt to “inhabit the consciousness of individual modernist writers”; and, third, the detailing of modernist “sociopolitical, historical, and philosophical contexts.”13 The Stranger’s Child (2011) is the most metamodernist of Hollinghurst’s fictions. The novel has two primary protagonists. One is Daphne Sawle, one of the few characters who appears through most of the novel. The second is “Cess,” Cecil Valance, a young upper-middle class poet killed at the Somme in World War I.14 Cess puts in an intriguing but disturbing appearance in Section 1 but then disappears as a character from the novel as a result of his early death. However, as a figure in what Roland

230  Male Homoerotics Barthes calls “the hermeneutic code” of realist fiction, Cess continues as a haunting absence.15 For Barthes, the code is an enigmatic question posed within the text that needs to be answered satisfactorily if closure is to be achieved. In this way, the presence of the code generates readerly desire. In S/Z, the question is whether the leading figure in Balzac’s short story, “Sarrasine,” is male or female. In The Stranger’s Child, the question is as to whether “Two Acres,” the poem that Cess wrote during a brief visit to Daphne’s home in 1913, was addressed to her or to her brother George, Cess’s Oxford classmate. Following Cess’s death, his memory acquires the romance of his male beauty, early death, and chosen vocation as a poet. Daphne shares a measure of this celebrity as a result of her lifelong insistence that he dedicated “Two Acres” to her. Other versions of the poem, however, may have been dedicated to George, with whom Cess was having an affair at the time of the visit.16 Section 2 of the novel, set in 1926, focuses on efforts led by Cess’s mother to memorialize her son. To this end, she chooses as his memoirist a male admirer willing to provide a bowdlerized portrait of the young poet/soldier. She also has an elaborate marble tomb installed in her son’s honor in the chapel at Corley Court, the family’s Victorian Gothic pile. Sections 3 and 4 take place more than a generation later, in the 1960s and 1970s, when Paul Bryant, a closeted young provincial who has long admired Cess’s poetry, is seduced by Peter Rowe, an Oxford graduate teaching at Corley Court, now converted into a second-tier preparatory school. Bryant goes on to make his name by researching and writing a sexually sensational biography of the poet. In the coda of the novel, which opens at a memorial service for Rowe, the reader learns that the uncertainty as to the identification of the dedicatee of “Two Acres,” is a bit of a Hitchcockian “MacGuffin” whose answer, circumstantially at least, appears to be George.17 More significantly, at the end of the novel, a rare book seller, Rob Salter, comes into possession of a notebook which includes a copy of an unposted letter, written by Cess the night before his death, in which he declares that he has just written a poem in which he publicly affirms love between men. After Cess’s death, the poem disappears, perhaps deliberately destroyed. Cess’s life is closely modeled on the biography of Rupert Brooke, a charismatic young poet of the 1910s.18 Brooke’s foreshortened career offers something of a model instance of the commodification of art and its makers’ biographies that James had already explored in texts such as The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and The Aspern Papers (1889). In fashioning a romantic, nonconformist persona for himself across a number of different social and cultural circles, Brooke exploited these aspects of the literary marketplace. Julie Rivkin sees two distinct phases in this process. Brooke’s death in 1915, en route to Gallipoli as part of the Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, provided an opportunity for admirers then and afterwards, including Churchill himself, to convert

Male Homoerotics  231 Brooke into an icon of youthful self-sacrifice on behalf of the Empire. Two generations later new biographers such as Nigel Jones and Paul Delany obliged the public by rewriting Brooke as a sexually complex figure.19 The reputation of James himself has followed a similar trajectory in “the construction of everything from Leon Edel’s Master to the Queer James of our own era.”20 Hollinghurst mimes this process in The Stranger’s Child, in which he shows how Cecil Valance is, in Rivkin’s words, first “converted into a patriotic monument and then reclaimed for a different, though no less political, agenda”21 (82). In doing so, Hollinghurst satirizes the fashion in gay-oriented writing of the 1970s and 1980s to “out” significant historical and artistic figures. In Sections 1 and 2, Cecil is a sexual rogue transformed into a hero of the War as a result of the accident of his death. Books Three and Four demonstrate the “literary concupiscence” of his gay biographer. 22 Brooke in his lifetime was emotionally and sexually drawn to members of both sexes. The social environments that he encountered at school, university, and later were intensely male homosocial. He cultivated both influential older male homosexual mentors and membership in social networks of what today would be described as young gay men. At university and later, he used these social intimacies as opportunities to declare by contrast his own sexual normalcy. However, given his primary sexual interest in young women as an adult, he may have enjoyed the sexually relaxed environment of male homosexual culture as a reprieve from the anxiety induced by current standards of personal conduct for young heterosexual men and women, which called for a new openness about bodies and desires by members of both sexes at a time when young women were nonetheless still expected—and often or usually themselves anticipated—that they would remain physical virgins until marriage. 23 The ensuing double bind poisoned Brooke’s intimacies with young women. While in preparatory school and at Rugby, Brooke had engaged in passionate, embodied romances with other boys and young men. 24 In an account sent to James Strachey, Brooke described in clinical emotional and physical detail his first (and possibly only) experience of anal sex with Denham Russell-Smith, one of the boys with whom he had had affairs while at Rugby (Jones, 138–141). 25 However, it is evident from correspondence which Jones quotes at length that Brooke’s romantic imagination and sexual interests came to focus primarily on members of the opposite sex, Noel Olivier first and foremost among them. Although Brooke was familiar with sexological and psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality, he both characterized and experienced sexual desire and romantic attachment primarily in literary terms, drawn in particular from ancient Greek lyric poetry, which he had studied at school; from John Donne and other metaphysical poets and dramatists, interest in whom was being revived at the turn of the century; and late

232  Male Homoerotics nineteenth-century Aestheticist and Decadent writers such as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds. These affiliations, which color a love poem such as “Mummia” in Brooke’s Collected Poems (31), align with an aspect of modernism admired by Virginia Woolf, who in her literary criticism linked the disintegration of the modern subject to the abyssal realism of writers of nineteenth-century Russian fiction such as Dostoevsky (Lee, 317). In John Webster & Elizabethan Drama, Brooke’s fellowship thesis for King’s College, he writes of Webster: “I can figure him as a more or less realistic novelist of the present or the last eighty years, preferably from Russia. His literary skill, his amazing genius for incorporating fragments of his experience, his ‘bitter flashes’ and slow brooding atmosphere of gloom, would have been” better suited to the novel than to the stage. “One can see, almost quote from, a rather large grey-brown novel by John Webster, a book full of darkly suffering human beings, slightly less inexplicable than Dostoieffsky’s, but as thrilling, figures glimpsed by sudden flashes that tore the gloom they were part of; a book such that one would remember the taste of the whole longer than any incident or character” (80). Brooke’s lacerating and self-lacerating correspondence with women such as Noel Olivier and “Ka,” Kathleen Cox, bears a strong resemblance to the emotional extremity of Webster’s verse. 26 While there are many reasons why Brooke married neither woman, including his inability to declare his independence of a controlling and puritanical mother, one of the most important may lie in the chaste intimacies that he experienced with other boys while in prep school. At the time, Brooke fell in love with three of his fellow students. Jones writes: “These relationships, powered by the high-octane fuel of adolescent hormones, were the most intense of his life. They set a template of ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ love that he would search for in vain in his heterosexual relationships” (30). Jones here touches on yet another possible outcome of male homosocial desire, namely a double bind in which “the most intimate male bonding” is prescribed at the same time that “the remarkably cognate” homosexuality is proscribed. 27 For men like Brooke, another effect of the incitement to male-male desire may have been that the purity of these early loves instilled an experience and a standard to which adult male-female sexual intimacy could not aspire. Brooke was not able to achieve sexual bliss with a woman until 1914, when he sailed to Tahiti, glamorized for him by Gauguin’s immoralist paintings, sculptures, and South Seas memoir, Noa, Noa (1901). There, in his relations with Maimoa (“Mamua” in Brooke’s love poem, “Tiare Tahiti”) and Taatamata (Tumatataata Tapotofarerani), two young Tahitian women, he (and, apparently, they) found momentary fulfillment. Of course, their happiness depended upon his advantaged position as a white man in colonial Tahiti. Neither woman, both from respected

Male Homoerotics  233 families, appears to have lost caste as a result of her connection with him. Following his departure, however, Mamua likely died in the flu epidemic of 1918, which may have first reached epidemic proportions on the Western Front. Taatamata for her part lived a long full life, with many children, likely from several partners, including possibly a stillborn infant by Brooke, and later a common-law marriage to Mike Fogel, an American musician (Delany 242, 244). The Stranger’s Child is an overdetermined work of historical fiction that includes elements of other genres such as biography, memoir, and literary history. As an exercise in the cultural anthropology of sex, the novel focuses primarily on the development of male homosexuality from the early 1900s to date. But Hollinghurst also directs his attention to the condition of middle- and upper-class women in his characterization of Daphne, the novel’s leading female character. In her memoir, Daphne focuses on her claim to have served as Cecil’s muse. But the brief, rough kiss that he seizes from her early in the novel is a troubling, even shocking event that carries along with it a trail of unforeseen consequences. Daphne is fascinated both by the intimacy seized and by the spooning that she sees Cess and her brother carry on in the hammock. But the kiss itself, on cigar-laced breath, repels her physically while devaluing her as a member of the opposite sex, woman. One wonders whether the shock produces effects which play out unconsciously in the problematic character of the marital choices that she makes following Cecil’s death. In Section 1, Daphne is introduced as an intelligent, curious albeit inexperienced adolescent. The continual harassment that she experiences in her older brothers’ teasing does not help. 28 Denied both sexual knowledge and access to formal higher education, she makes a disastrous marriage to Cess’s younger brother, Dudley, a bitter, disabled war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress. Daphne and Dudley’s daughter, Corinna, grows up to become the caretaker of another war-damaged husband, in this case as a result of action in World War II. A gifted pianist, she is consigned to teaching young boys at Corley Court. Eventually, she commits suicide. Daphne’s second marriage is to a closeted gay painter named Revel Ralph. Her third marriage, to a Jewish man of business, leaves her facing near poverty as a widow in old age. Often Daphne seems somewhat dissociated, frequently in an alcoholic haze. In old age, she is finds care in Wilfrid, her and Dudley’s ‘simple’ but brutalized son. Both Wilf and Daphne, however, prove to be more than a match for Paul Bryant when he comes calling in search of a draft copy of “Two Acres.” Section 5 of The Stranger’s Child, “The Old Companions,” functions as a coda to the action. Its occasion, a memorial service for a media personality named Peter Rowe, takes place in London in 2008. Narrated

234  Male Homoerotics by Rob, for whom Rowe was a valued customer, the event signifies the civil consolidation of gay identity in contemporary England. Rowe too had an interest in Valance manuscripts and memorabilia. An alumnus of Magdalen, Oscar Wilde’s College at Oxford, Peter enters the novel in 1967 at the start of Section 2. In the coda, the reader learns that he later became the host of a BBC television series, “The Victorian Dream,” and “Writers at War” for Granada. During his lifetime, Peter frequently toyed with the idea of writing a biography of Valance. In the event, however, the honor fell to Bryant, whom Rowe first met while teaching at Corley Court. Bryant later achieved success as an author of commercial biography, in part by being the first of Cecil’s biographers to “out” him. At the memorial service, Bryant offers a eulogy in Rowe’s honor. After surprising Rowe’s gay friends by taking the opportunity to announce that the pair had once had an affair, he proceeds to belittle Rowe’s career. 29 Not satisfied with this disclosure, Bryant in the biography had already claimed that two of Daphne’s three children were illegitimate. According to Bryant, Corinna was Cecil’s daughter not Dudley’s. And Daphne’s son Wilfrid was in fact fathered by Mark Gibbons, another member of Dudley’s circle of artistic friends. George, whom Bryant interviews in Section 4, is the supposed source of this information. Unfortunately, however, at the time when Bryant interviews him, George is already an old man suffering from dementia. To make matters worse, Bryant’s tape recorder malfunctions during the interview; and the typist who transcribes the tape can’t make out the questions that Bryant is asking. George himself proves to be a resistant subject who may retain sufficient wit to lead his interrogator down a rabbit hole. Jennifer Ralph, Daphne’s granddaughter, tells Rob that she regards Bryant as “something of a fantasist” (405).30 It is not accidental that the memorial occurs four years after the passage of the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 nor that both Bryant and Rowe had taken advantage of the legislation. These details underscore the structuring of the novel in terms of the changing, generally improving legal and social conditions in which gay men in England live. Other details in the novel correlate with the tendency to associate the neoliberal economic policies of the past 40 years with the enhancement of civil liberties for members of sexual and gender minorities. The name of Francis Fukuyama, who served as deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff during the presidency of George H. W. Bush and was formerly employed as an analyst by the Rand Corporation, is prominently associated with this trend.31 In an influential if question-begging essay, “The End of History” (1989), Fukuyama drew on the work of the Hegelian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, in contending that the failure of both fascist and communist movements in the twentieth century had validated the role of laissez-faire liberal ideology “at the vanguard of civilization” as realized in the founding constitutional documents of

Male Homoerotics  235 late eighteenth-century France and the United States. Fukuyama follows Kojève in describing the emergent model as that of the “universal homogenous state,” that is, a state that “protects though a system of law man’s universal right to freedom” and achieves democracy by seeking “the consent of the governed.”32 Fukuyama glosses the term “freedom” as referring to “liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.”33 Neoliberal freedom, which is both individual and economic, is often defined primarily in terms of property rights, a definition which the United States Supreme Court has extended to private corporations defined as legal persons with Constitutional protections. John Maynard Keynes long ago pointed out that this concept of the liberal state misreads the work of John Locke and Adam Smith in asserting that “by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment, in conditions of freedom, always tend to promote the general interest at the same time.”34 Bryant’s partner Bobby, “a handsome young Chinese man” working in IT, tolerates Bryant’s “camp” public performance at the memorial with “sweet” but “tired” patience (415, 414). Desmond, Peter’s civil partner, is an immigrant from Nigeria. Ending the novel with mention of these two post-colonial unions might be taken to suggest that Hollinghurst seconds the celebration of the neo-liberal global market economy together with the expansion of the rights of privacy, including those secured for and by subjects of same-sex desire. But Bobby’s occupation seems more likely to be that of a programmer than an ambitious entrepreneur in digital media. And Bryant himself, as Jennifer Ralph suggests, is something of a con man, whose greatest success has been achieved as the gay debunker of a cherished figure of national myth. The content of Desmond’s eulogy, however, is detached from ideological claims of this sort. Instead he affirms the value of friendship. 35 “Being Peter’s friend had been the greatest privilege of his life.” The partnership “had been not only wonderfully happy but a celebration of everything that Peter had believed in and worked for. He had always said how important the changes in the law [that decriminalized sex between men] in 1967 had been to him and so many others like him, when he was a young man teaching at Corley Court, but that it was very imperfect, only a beginning, there were many more battles to be won, and the coming of civil partnerships for same-sex couples was a great development not just for them but for civil life in general” (413). The quotation leaves unanswered the question as to what Peter imagined as “only…beginning”? One possible answer is the achievement of the right of same-sex couples to marry, a goal which was won in 2013, nine years after civic partnerships were legalized.36 Hollinghurst’s novel does not end with the memorial service. The action shifts to Rob, another gay man. The final sequence occurs in

236  Male Homoerotics Harrow, where a newly discovered holograph manuscript directly linked to Cess’s final year of life has been discovered. A man named Raymond, who runs a used furniture and book store in Harrow, has invited Rob down from London to take a look at the new find: “a red leather-bound book, a thickish quarto, at a glance a journal or manuscript book” (425). It has been retrieved from a local villa, which at one time was the home of Harry Hewitt, the “wealthy old queen” (427) who in Section 1 had wooed Daphne’s family and, in particular her brother, Hubert, who also died during the War. The book includes copies of hitherto unknown letters from Cecil to Hewitt, beginning in September, 1913, when Cecil first visited the Sawles’ home. The final letter is dated June 27, 1916, the day before Cess was killed in action. In the letter he promises to send Hewitt new poems the following day. “They are for your eyes only,” Cecil writes, “you will see they are not publishable in my life-time—or England’s! One of them draws, you will see, on our last meeting” (431). The transcription is important because it appears to indicate that in the missing poems Cess explicitly affirmed his sexual and emotional ties with other men.37 Excited, Rob quickly leaves to search for the letters, held in the strong room of Hewitt’s one-time home, which is in process of being demolished. When Rob arrives, however, the letters are no longer there. Presumably they have been burned along with other trash. Additional incriminating material may have been posthumously destroyed by Cess’s mother (417) as were his letters to George. Had Cecil’s missing homoerotic poems been recovered, they would have contributed significantly to the history of modern sexualities—a history which, in fictional form, Hollinghurst is rewriting in The Stranger’s Child. As for Rob, he leaves Harrow at least with the notebook in hand and looking forward to a dinner date in London with Gareth, a new acquaintance whose name, for the moment, Rob is unable to remember (418). History may be effaced, but the seriality of gay connection continues; and out of linkages of desire history emerges. Hollinghurst has more to say about what Peter called “a beginning” in The Sparsholt Affair. The novel, whose action begins in 1940 and continues to 2012, is another genealogical fiction. Again doubling the narrative, Hollinghurst focuses in this instance on the experience of the novel’s chief protagonist, Johnny Sparsholt, the gay artist son of David, a closeted athlete, celebrated World War II fighter pilot, and later successful Midlands industrialist. David experienced disgrace when he was convicted and sent to prison on a morals charge in 1966, the year before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalized sex between men.38 In middle age, Johnny forms a civil partnership, which he calls a marriage (452) and in which he survives his partner, Pat, who dies possibly as a result of complications arising from HIV infection. Johnny also serves as the sperm donor chosen by a lesbian couple to father their child. Although he had not previously considered

Male Homoerotics  237 the possibility of paternity, when granted the opportunity, he seizes it but on condition that he be entitled to ongoing contact with the resulting offspring. In the event, he and his daughter Lucy become closely attached. As for Lucy, as a child, she is pleased to be distinguished as having three grandfathers. Later, as an adult, she takes for granted the existence of intimate ties between men—not an unusual outlook for young upper- and upper-middle-class Britons. Johnny’s somewhat estranged father, David, learns that his lineage has been extended in unforeseen fashion. When Lucy arrives at Johnny’s home at the very end of the novel in order to ensure that he will be attending her upcoming Society wedding at York Minster in proper attire, she assures him that José, his new live-in companion, is “rather a find” (453). She extends the invitation to him as well.39 In The Sparsholt Affair, Hollinghurst observes the invention of new forms of domestic life. He is also interested in the very different forms of sociality that arise in the dance club culture with which he was at one time familiar. Hollinghurst had already explored this double itinerary in The Spell (1998), a novel set in London and Dorset during the late 1990s. In that work, the dance club serves as the site of experiments in altered physical and psychological states, induced with the assistance of alcohol, cocaine, and, in particular, Ecstasy. This setting helps trigger experiences of bliss, at once sexual but also transcendental, comparable with the ecstatic states celebrated by early proponents of sexual and emotional ties between men such as Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter.40 In their work, Whitman and Carpenter celebrate individual transformation; sexual friendship across lines of class, race, and age; and the formation of democratic, at times socialist comradeship. Hollinghurst’s contribution is to track how both transitory and enduring relations can be mutually prompted, supported, and sustained among the chorus of male bodies dancing in loud dark rooms set aside for the public expression of alternative sexualities. In The Spell, immersion in dance club culture can be both freeing and devastating. Alex Nichols’ first visit to a London club with a new acquaintance prompts the start of an affair that will leave Alex high and dry but which also leads him, with the help of a friend, back to the scene of Ecstasy, the dance, and an opportunity, previously blocked and which Alex now seizes, of establishing a relationship with a more age-suitable and compatible man. Likewise, in The Sparsholt Affair, after a year in which Johnny mourns the death of his husband, a friend sparks him into revitalized existence by providing him with a twist of Ecstasy as they venture out to another club. In this case, the life-giving intimacy that can occur in such a setting is exemplified by Johnny’s encounter there with “Z,” a young Brazilian who is initially attracted to Johnny by his long gray hair. Their meeting, however, is interrupted when Johnny receives a text message from his step mother informing

238  Male Homoerotics him of the sudden death of his father. Realizing how upset Johnny is, Z asks to accompany him home, where they shower together while Johnny calms down. Johnny and Z’s nexus is short-lived; nonetheless, it is in context a sacramental act that restores Johnny, enabling him to deal with loss and the mourning of his father while likewise experiencing a renewed capacity for intimacy. Socially, Z’s caring response opens Johnny to further connections with young men, whether it be José, or Eduard, “the priceless warm young man” (451), whom Johnny meets in his studio shortly before Lucy’s visit. Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), is one of the first metamodernist novels, in some ways even more intricately structured than The Stranger’s Child and more wide-ranging in its settings. The novel follows the adventures of Will Beckwith, a young aristocratic rake, in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of AIDS in England. Near the end of the novel, Will is chagrined to learn that as Director of Public Prosecutions in the 1950s, Will’s grandfather, Sir Denis Beckwith, had led an anti-homosexual witch hunt in London.41 Will’s life as a rentier is based on Beckwith’s political and financial success. Another line in Will’s life extends to Bill Hawkins, an employee of the Corinthian Club, the men’s athletic facility where both Will and the novel’s secondary protagonist, Charles, Lord Nantwich, swim. Later in the novel, Will learns that Bill manages a teens’ amateur boxing club at Miles End founded and financed by Nantwich in 1955 as a result of his having met Bill in prison a year earlier. In 1954, Nantwich had been imprisoned as a result of police entrapment in a men’s lavatory in Kensington Gardens. Bill, also arrested on a morals charge, had been jailed at age 18 as a result of an affair with a younger teen. After Nantwich’s release, he was determined both to help Bill personally and to engage in philanthropic work on behalf of working-class boys and young men. In the course of the novel, Bill and Will become rivals for the affection and loyalty of Phil, a young body builder at the Corinthian from a similar economic background. In the fourth generation, the Beckwith line extends to “Roops,” Rupert Croft-Parker, Will’s six-year-old nephew, who shows a keen interest in the men and boys who catch his uncle’s eye (66).42 Roops’s curiosity suggests that he may grow up to be gay. Later in the novel, Will is surprised to encounter Roops’s dad Gavin at a gallery opening for an exhibition by Ronald Staines, a camp elderly photographer. An old friend and fellow member of Wicks’s, Nantwich’s London club, Staines is involved with Nantwich in some of the Lord’s more dubious philanthropic ventures. Gavin’s appearance at the exhibition is a clue that he is already familiar with Staines and Nantwich’s louche sexual entanglements, which repel Will. Nantwich and Will have become fatefully linked early in the novel when Will saves the octogenarian by administering “the kiss of life”

Male Homoerotics  239 to him after he passes out in a “cottage” in Kensington Gardens. The circumstances suggest that this fortuitous exchange may prove to be life-giving for both partners. When Will subsequently notices Nantwich swimming at the Corinthian, he introduces himself. An acquaintanceship springs up and grows closer when Nantwitch, for reasons of his own, engages Will in a project to review Nantwich’s personal papers with an eye toward possibly writing a biography. As Will reads Nantwich’s Egyptian notebooks, journals, and the apologia, reminiscent of Wilde’s De Profundis, that Nantwich wrote after leaving prison, it becomes clear that the resulting book could provide an original and instructive introduction to the conditions of repression and suppression in which subjects of male same-sex desire in England and the Empire lived. The longest and most intimate (though not sexual) relationship recorded by Nantwich is with Taha al-Azhari, a young Nobu, whom Nantwich employed as a houseboy while serving as a British magistrate in the Sudan in the 1920s. When Nantwich retired to England in the 1940s, he brought Taha home with him. When Taha married a few years later, Nantwich provided the couple with a small house in North Kensington. A generation later, Nantwich procured Taha’s son Abdul a livelihood as a chef at Wicks’s. As presented in The Swimming-Pool Library, Nantwich’s life has a significance which exceeds that of fictional biography or social and cultural history. His course from idealism to disillusionment provides a fictional example of the double character of the ideology of Empire in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century. In Imperialism: A Study (1902), J. A. Hobson, the leading liberal twentieth-century economist prior to the emergence of John Maynard Keynes in 1919, lays out both the idealistic and the material motives of imperial policy.43 He notes that “there exists in a considerable though not a large proportion of the British nation a genuine desire to spread Christianity among the heathen, to diminish the cruelty and other sufferings which they believe exist in countries less fortunate than their own, and to do good work about the world in the cause of humanity.” To this benign view, however, Hobson retorts:“Analysis of the actual course of modern Imperialism has laid bare the combination of economic and political forces which fashions it. These forces are traced to their sources in the selfish interests of certain industrial, financial, and professional classes, seeking private advantages out of a policy of imperial expansion, and using this same policy to protect them in their economic, political, and social privileges against the pressure of democracy.” Hobson regards the moralizing account of the imperial mission to be harmful. “It is precisely in this falsification of the real import of motives that the gravest vice and the most signal peril of Imperialism reside.… The whole policy of Imperialism is riddled with this deception.”44

240  Male Homoerotics In his journals, cited in the novel, Nantwich’s erotic idealization of the men of Nuba provides the single most important motive for his work as a colonial magistrate. Moreover, Nantwich takes his dedication to their benefit to be grounded in his nature as a homosexual.45 After saving Taha’s life when endangered by a scorpion bite, Nantwich writes in his journal: “I felt all my vague, ideal emotions about Africa & my wandering autocratic life here take substance before my bleary eyes…. [Taha] lay with his head back, half off the pillow, an arm flung out, the fingers twitching with his pulse, only an inch above the floor… At once I saw he was my responsibility made flesh: he was all the offspring I will never have, all my futurity. He became so beautiful to me that my mouth went dry, & when he woke he found me staring at him” (246). The acceptance of the ethical significance of male homosexual exceptionalism is not restricted to Nantwich and his contemporaries. For example, later in the novel, Will’s best friend James, a dedicated physician, says to him: “We [gay men] must be as creative as possible—even if we can’t actually have children, we must give ourselves completely to whatever we do, as I’ve always sort of thought. We must make something out of everything we do” (258). In fact, however, just as noble pronouncements by politicians can mask their service to money, power, and the enforcement of invidious distinctions, Nantwich’s idealism over time yields to crassness and manipulations, i.e., “the Nantwich feudal system”(159), as Will calls it. Over time, Will comes to recognize his new friend to be “a fixer and favouritiser” (287). And when James, later in the novel, is arrested in circumstances resembling those in which Nantwich himself had been arrested, Nantwich’s reflex is to protect members of his sexual clique from becoming involved even if that means leaving James to hang out to dry. Nantwich knew male sex early. Anally raped shortly after he entered school, he became involved in elite school boy sex at the same time that he fell into a sublimated love for Webster, a half caste youth from Tobago (132), wealthy, intelligent, sensitive, and beautiful. Later, in Africa, Nantwich idealized black men too highly to buy pornographic male photos, but, after his return to England in the 1940s, he enjoyed a brief but rapturous encounter with Roy Bartholemew, a black G.I.46 (263–264). At the same time, Nantwich’s desire for Taha remained sublimated in a mutual exchange of friendship and service. However, during and after Nantwich’s imprisonment in the aggressively anti-­homosexual atmosphere of the Cold War in the UK during the 1950s, he came to recognize himself to be a debased outsider, like the “nonces” with whom he struck up mutual friendships while in prison. This sociality of social rejects thenceforth became his own. Nantwich recalls the now outmoded figure of the so-called good Tory, the man of good family and long l­ineage who is attentive to the needs of his dependents and the respectable poor. But Nantwich’s experience suggests that the liminal social and legal position in which

Male Homoerotics  241 affluent male Tories sexually and emotionally attracted to other males found themselves tended to drive them into a shadowy economy of sex and favors. The nadir of these linkages occurs late in the novel when Will learns that Nantwich is financing the making of male pornographic films, directed by Staines and including among others teen-aged waiters for whom Nantwich has found employment at Wicks’s. In the ultimate debasement, Abdul, his body heavily scarred, appears in the film in the role of stud. Later, at the end of the novel, Abdul reciprocates Will’s spontaneous sexual interest in a scene of ambiguous rape.47 In A Stranger’s Child, published a quarter century later, Hollinghurst takes a less disabused view. Desmond’s eulogy brings a degree of closure to the topic of the slow growth in social and legal acceptance of sexual and emotional ties between men in England since the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957. In contrast to the state of temporal stasis with which Empire is represented in many texts written between the World Wars, the fact that Desmond has been able to enter into a legal domestic partnership with a white man indicates the possibility of fashioning new and distinct temporalities.48 Reviewing A Stranger’s Child in 2011, Geoff Dyer described what he thought of as “the larger project of Hollinghurst’s fiction,” namely “to track the emergence of homosexuality, that ‘unimagined and yet vaguely dreaded thing,’ as a shaping force in British society at large, shaping not only through liberalization but also under repression.”49 From the very outset, however, Hollinghurst has also had a second, parallel project in mind, namely to emphasize the black fact in English life today as well as in the imperial past. Because of his preoccupation with black-white relations in the context of male same-sex desire, the two projects intertwine in his work. One of Hollinghurst’s main topics has been the presence and suppression of British African and Afro-Caribbean linkages in the life and history of the United Kingdom. In Britain in the post-War period, anti-­ black prejudice has repeatedly distorted both everyday existence and national politics. Most commonly associated with the right-wing politics of Enoch Powell in the 1960s and early 1970s, anti-black propaganda has been an ongoing reality in British media, politics, and governance, including during and after the Brexit campaign of 2016. In the limbo of Parliamentary politics that followed the success of the campaign, this particular aspect of Hollinghurst’s fiction became yet more salient.50 Moreover, what I have called the black fact reaches back both into imperial history and ideology and forward to what Paul Gilroy has celebrated as the “the chaotic pleasures of the convivial postcolonial urban world” (151) of Great Britain today, which Gilroy believes to be capable of displacing the racialized binary that nativist polemicists continually attempt to re-impose upon contemporary and future Britons. A passerby walking along King Street in Hammersmith on a pleasant Saturday afternoon may well feel that they understand what Gilroy has in mind. But

242  Male Homoerotics how predictive the experience will prove to be remains in the air. The Windrush Scandal of spring 2018 clearly indicates that anti-black and anti-brown prejudice is alive and well at the highest levels of national government.51 Hollinghurst has long shown interest in intimacies between white men and men of color in England. Sometimes the relations that he represents demonstrate lifelong loyalties. But even when casual, intimacies can change lives.52 One such instance in The Spell produces a scene that, even years later, hints at the disruptive force that some supporters of Brexit associate with the presence of blacks. When a young black hustler named Gary turns up in The Spell at a birthday party hosted by Danny at his father Robin Woodfield’s home in Dorset, Gary is unaware that one of his former clients, Justin, is now Robin’s partner. The new circumstances occasion some unanticipated effects. For the first time in the action, Robin catches Justin in a major lie when Justin pretends that Gary is a stranger. Robin, however, is already aware that Justin was a ‘regular’ of Gary’s during Justin’s relationship with Alex Nichols. When Gary quickly picks up a new customer (alas, the unknowing Alex, Justin’s former live-in partner), Robin asks his son’s acquaintance to leave. The calamitous weekend ends with Robin and Justin agreeing to a trial separation. This scene can serve as a charged allegory of the racialist fantasmatic that characterizes some individuals and members of groups such as the UK Independence Party who supported the yes vote in the 2016 referendum. 53 Gilroy contends that UKIP and its supporters fantasize Britain as a unitary national culture that has been fractured as a result of successive waves of immigration since World War II. (Of course, as the name indicates, the United Kingdom has never been a unitary nation-state.) The first surge of post-War migrants was comprised of black African or Afro-Caribbean residents, but large-scale migration continued with large numbers of dark skinned South Asians arriving after the scission of India and Pakistan in 1947. For UKIP and its sympathizers, immigrants of color constitute an “alien cultural type” (122) that remains unassimilable even in the second and third generations, a conviction that is reflected in the effort of former Prime Minister Theresa May’s government in effect to revoke the citizenship of descendants of Commonwealth passport holders who, following the end of World War II, had been invited by the British government to migrate to England in order to take part in the work of postwar reconstruction. 54 The essentialism of the UKIP view makes clear its character as a racial typology. Gilroy argues that subsequent waves of immigration between the 1970s and 1990s, including from fellow members of the European Union such as Poland, have been characterized in similar exclusionary terms despite the obvious racial and cultural differences from the earlier migrations.

Male Homoerotics  243 In A Spell, Gary functions as the indigestible element that has invaded Robin and Justin’s Dorset cottage, which Robin, an architect who specializes in restorations of domestic architecture, has tastefully refurbished. Robin and Justin’s rural retreat signifies their existence as actual but sexually compromised Englishmen just as, in a Dorset perspective, the restored cottage lacks authenticity and the couple who inhabit it are themselves improper. During the party, Robin experiences a crisis of middle-aged masculinity as he contends with multiple disruptions of his usually carefully managed physical and psychical spaces. He is exposed for the first time to his son Danny’s consumption of coke. As well, Justin’s former lover, Alex, arrives unexpectedly. Gary’s intrusion proves to be the last straw. For his part, Gary is by no means an innocent player in the ensuing play of Shakespearean misdirections. He has signaled his boundary-crossing intentions already on arrival when he chooses to park his car half way across a neighbor’s driveway, the first of a series of his transgressions in the eyes of Robin, who, despite his own Dorset background and upper-class manners, loses his temper and orders Gary to leave. Especially post-Brexit, temporality in Hollinghurst’s fiction is paradoxical. On a national and international scale, Britain appears to be caught in a state of slow disintegration. At the same time, at least for now, white middle- and upper-class gays and lesbians are experiencing unprecedented social enfranchisement. The long temporal reach of Hollinghurst’s most recent novels offers what Gilroy might term a subtle “counterhistory” (147) to what he has also referred to as the narrative of “postcolonial melancholia” that he detects in Tory (and UKIP) rhetoric and politics. What is paradoxical in Hollinghurst may also be prophetic—in the same way that Gilroy prophesies that the “culture of conviviality” may offer the UK means for dealing with racial tensions in ways that avoid becoming caught in the sort of binary ideological structures in which both conservative apologists at home and, in Gilroy’s view, members of liberal elites in a country such as the United States appear to be caught. In the meantime, the violence, physical and psychical, against those who have been othered, as in the Windrush affair, continues.55 Just as Virginia Woolf’s writing, public and private, in the mid-1930s presaged new formations of intimacy while anticipating catastrophe on a global scale, Hollinghurst’s fiction depicts a world that is simultaneously improving, congealed, and coming undone.

Notes 1 Brooks, Henry James Goes to Paris, 1; Woolf, Roger Fry, 180. 2 Brooks, Ibid. Jonathan Freedman explores James’s relation to modernism in Professions of Taste, 131–132. 3 Brooks uses the word to mean reality in its vernacular sense not Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the real,” as frequently used in academic literary and cultural criticism (Feminine Sexuality, 31).

244  Male Homoerotics 4 Brooks, Henry James, 2. 5 In The Historical Novel, Lukács contrasts historical fiction in the nineteenth century to modernist fiction by arguing that the latter lacks a dialectical structure comparable with that of Scott and Balzac. In the following paragraph, I argue that metamodernism as practiced by Hollinghurst continues the formal and stylistic innovations of literary modernism while also taking a dialectical approach in writing in fictional form the history of homosexuality in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. At the end of this chapter, I further argue the relation of Hollinghurst’s analysis with other aspects of contemporary history, namely the politics of African and Afro-Caribbean migration to England as well as the relation between the politics of contemporary civil rights and neo-liberal governmentality in England today. For a detailed analysis of the contrast between Lukács’ history of fiction since 1848 and Hollinghurst’s dialectical approach, see Mathuray, “On Aesthetic and Historical Dissonance in The Stranger’s Child.” 6 See Vlitos, “Homosexualising the Novel,” 13–34. 7 Jesse Matz’s concept of time ecology is relevant here. As he says in his chapter on E. M. Forster’s proto-gay novel, Maurice, “the ecological text explicitly situates itself in time in such a way as to endorse its own contribution to the semantics of action that compose the time environment” (Modernist Time Ecology, 134). 8 See Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. See also Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality, 149–151 et passim. 9 Gilroy, 121.





Male Homoerotics  245





























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34 35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46

Library, in which British imperial ideology over the course of the twentieth century is seen (in the autobiography of Lord Nantwich) to decline from sincere but naïve idealization of indigenous subjects to pornographic commercial exploitation. The thoughtless sexual prospecting of the novel’s other protagonist, Will Beckwith, a promiscuous young upper-class gay male, is also colored by the contradiction. Cited from Keynes’s The End of Laissez–Faire (1926) by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement, 134. In Friendship’s Bonds, I examine the role that the values of justice and equality in the Victorian reception of Classical friendship theory in Plato and Aristotle played in the effort to invent political democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. See also my study of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in “Earnshaw’s Neighbor/Catherine’s Friend.” The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act of 2013. Another indicative text occurs in “the Trickett MS” (417), which Bryant had earlier brought to the attention of Nigel Dupont, in Part 3 a student of Peter’s and later the editor of Valance’s poems. Dupont tells Rob that Bryant had located “an unpublished part of one of the poems, which turned out to be a sort of queer manifesto, except in tetrameter couplets” (417–418). Bryant stole the ms from Jonah Trickett, who had attracted Cess’s errant desire while a young servant of the Sawleses in 1913. The obvious parallel is the Profumo affair, a heterosexual scandal of 1961 involving Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model, and John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the Cabinet of P. M. Harold Macmillan. The incident shook the Tory Party, which lost the next general election in 1964. In 1962, another scandal broke involving an Admiralty Clerk, John Vassall, who in 1954 had been successfully blackmailed into spying by the Soviets, who threatened otherwise to expose his homosexuality. In these details, Hollinghurst counters the complaint, familiar in queer theory, that same-sex marriage will replicate the limits and exclusions of conventional marriage. See, for example, Warner, The Trouble with Normal (1999). For example, Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 34–36. 105–115; Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age in Selected Writings, 175–177); Ioläus passim. Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, 325. Subsequent page references to the novel appear in the text. Roops’s last name calls to mind the name of Rupert Croft-Cooke, the author of Feasting with Panthers, a pioneering 1960s study of elite male homosexual culture in England in the late nineteenth century. The Swimming-Pool Library is sprinkled with names that call to mind Oscar Wilde, who was jailed in 1895 for having violated the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. For the text of the Amendment, see Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 243 (n. 24). Similarly, the name of the Queensberry Hotel, where Phil is employed and has lodgings, recalls the name of the ninth marquess of Queensberry, whose public accusation of Wilde as a “somdomite,” precipitated the series of actions that led to the Wilde trials. At the time, Wilde was in love with Alfred Douglas, Queensberry’s son. See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Keynes. Hobson, Imperialism, 196–197, 196, 198. Nantwich shared Freud and Krafft-Ebing’s view that while homosexuality was abnormal it was not unnatural. In contrast, Patrick Deer notes that thousands of civilian and military men of color from the colonies and Dominions who took an active part in the

Male Homoerotics  247 War effort in Britain plus the130,000 black American GIs stationed there “were… viewed with official hostility” (Culture and Camouflage, 109). 47 A subplot in the novel focuses on Will’s intense and exploitative relation with Arthur Hope, an adolescent of Afro-Caribbean background who lives in a housing project in North London and has been drawn into the drug trade by his older brother. These portions of The Swimming-Pool Library are conditioned by stereotypes of black and white working- and sub-­working-class life in English cities that were current in British media of the 1980s. Nonetheless, the linkage between the two lovers remains culturally and s­ ociologically significant. 48 The relationship, both fraught and creative, between temporality and gay, lesbian, and queer existence has become a major topic in the theory of sexual dissidence in the years since 2000. See, for example: Edelman, No Future; Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place and The Queer Art of Failure; Love, Looking Backward; Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Freeman, ed., Queer Temporalities, and author of Time Binds; Freccero, Queer, Early, Modern and “The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature”; Jagose, Inconsequence; Stockton, The Queer Child; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, and Matz, Modernist Time Ecology. 49 Dyer, “The Secret Gardener.” 50 Ironically, the fiasco of the Tory government’s response to the results of the Brexit referendum returned Britain for three years to something like the state of temporal stasis that characterized England between 1918 and 1947. 51 See Goodfellow. “A New Face Won’t Change the British Government’s Racist Heart.” For a bibliography to the groundbreaking series of articles on the scandal published by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian, see “Windrush Scandal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal 52 Johnson, Alan Hollinghurst, 84–112. In another instance, in his political novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), Hollinghurst uses the failure of an interracial romance to draw attention to a crucial character flaw of Nick Guest, the novel’s young gay protagonist. Thanks are due to Richard Kaye for our conversations concerning Nick. 53 The moving force behind the demand for a referendum was UKIP, the UK Independence Party, which consists of a right-wing anti-EU group of Tory Party members who broke from the party in the early 1990s. Preserving and restoring the presumed Anglo-Saxon ethnic character of the body politic was a motivating force for members of this group. Another driver was a wish to revive under British leadership economic and cultural links with the Commonwealth of former settler colonies. There are, however, ideological cross currents in the Party; and some members sought objectives that would effectively undercut British autonomy. Nigel Farage, the former leader of the Party, and other wealthy supporters continue to support neo-liberal ‘free market’ policies that in practice would exacerbate the long-term process by which small-town and rural ­England, the industrialized North, and portions of the Midlands continue to lose resources and employment to producers overseas. 54 See en. 49 above. 55 On Windrush, see n. 50.

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248  Male Homoerotics Blankley, Elyse. “Deviant Desires and the Queering of Leonard Woolf.” In  Queer Bloomsbury, ed. Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. 223–239. Bradley, John R. “Alan Hollinghurst’s Fiction.” Oxford Review, 1.4; 2.1: 8–24. Brooke, Rupert. Collected Poems. San Bernadino, CA: Astounding Stories, 2018. ———. John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1916. Brooks, Peter. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible War. New York: Basic Books, 2017. Carpenter, Edward. Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship. 1917. Reprint. New York: Pagan Press, 1982. ———. Selected Writings: Volume 1: Sex. Introd. Noël Greig. London: GMP Publishers Ltd., 1984. Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009. Delany, Paul. Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke. Montreal: ­McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2015. ———. The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle. London: Macmillan, 1987. Dellamora, Richard. “Earnshaw’s Neighbor/Catherine’s Friend: Ethical Contingencies in Wuthering Heights.” ELH, 74 (2007): 535–555. ———. Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ———.“Tradition and Apocalypse in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library.” In Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994. Pp. 173–191. Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2012. Dyer, Geoff. “The Secret Gardener.” https: nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/ alan-hollinghurst-2011-10/ Freccero, Carla. Queer, Early, Modern. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. ———. “The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature: History and Temporality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, ed. Jodie Medd. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. 19–31. Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990. Freeman, Elizabeth, ed. “Queer Temporalities.” GLQ, 13: 2–3 (2007). ———. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2010. Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989): 1–18. ———. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Bard, 1998. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005. Goodfellow, Maya. “ A New Face Won’t Change the British Government’s Racist Heart.” www.nytimes.com/20/18/05/02/opinion/sajid-javid-home-officehostile government.html

Male Homoerotics  249 Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York Univ. Press, 2005. ———. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011. Hall, Lesley A. Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hamilton, Ian. Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography from Shakespeare to Plath. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1994. Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty. London: Picador, 2004. ———. The Sparsholt Affair. London: Picador, 2017. ———. The Stranger’s Child. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. ———. The Swimming-Pool Library. New York: Vintage, 1989. Holroyd, Michael. Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography. London: Heinemann, 1967–1968. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2002. James, David, and Urmila Seshagiri. “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution.” PMLA, 129.1 (January 2014): 87–100. James, Henry. Tales.Ed. Christof Wegelin. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984. Johnson, Allan. Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Jones, Nigel. Life, Death, and Myth: Rupert Brooke. London: Head of Zeus Ltd, 2015. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Mallon, Thomas. “Alan Hollinghurst Imagines a Fallen Poet’s Literary Afterlife.” www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/books/review/the-strangers-child-by-alan— hollinghurst-book-review Mathuray, Mark. “On Aesthetic and Historical Dissonance in The Stranger’s Child.” In Sex and Sensibility in the Novels of Alan Hollinghurst, ed. Mark Mathuray. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 151–173. Matz. Jesse. Modernist Time Ecology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2019. McAlpin, Heller. “The Sparsholt Affair Finds Truth Somewhere between Satire and Sentiment.” www.npr.org/2018/03/17591151287/the-sparsholt-affair-findstruth-somewhere-between-satire-and-sentiment Motion, Andrew. Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confessions of Thomas ­Griffiths Wainewright. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York Univ. Press, 2009. Nixon, Rob. “Anthropocene 2.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2017. Pp. 43–46. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1873. Rivkin, Julie. “The Stranger’s Child and The Aspern Papers: Queering Origin Stories and Questioning the Visitable Past.” In Alan Hollinghurst: Writing

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes abjection 34, 165–166 abuse (psychological and sexual) 28, 29, 30, 32, 79, 97–98, 99, 101, 128, 177, 192, 197 Achebe, Chinua 5 Ackland, Valentine 65–70, 72–75, 83 aesthetics/Aestheticism vii, 4, 27–28, 34, 75–76, 88–89, 141, 197, 232 Affinity (Waters) 11, 14–15, 187–200 Ahmed, Sara 18n43 Allen, Hope Emily 14 anachronism 46–48, 60 anarchism 165 Anderson, Amanda 207 Anderson, Perry 83, 108, 113n89 androgyny (mental) 133 The Angel in the House (Patmore) 49 antisemitism 8, 130, 150 Aristotle 110n37, 119, 246n35 Asquith, Anthony 60 “asynchrony” (Dinshaw) 14 Auden, W. H. 164 Aurora Leigh (Barrett) 192 An Autobiography (Trollope) 180 Badiou, Alain 8, 18, 89, 109n7, 219 Balázs, Béla 9 Baldick, Chris 5, 6, 88 Banfield, Ann vii, 18n27, 89, 109n5, 109n7 “barbarianism, my” (Gauguin, 27) 41n13, 42n15 Barber, Stephen 132 Barrett, Elizabeth 192 Barthes, Roland 229–230 Baudelaire, Charles 4, 24, 40, 94 Bell, Clive 9 Bell, Vanessa 91, 92, 99, 105, 106, 108 Benjamin, Walter 7–8, 89, 90, 94, 105 Bentham, Jeremy 188–189

Bergson, Henri 9, 13, 118 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, JacquesHenri 208 Besant, Annie 209 black box (concept) 49 blackout (in Hamilton) 141 Blavatsky, Madame 209 Bloomsbury Group 6, 8, 88, 91, 92, 102, 105, 106, 108, 113n68 Boehmer, Elleke 209 Bourget, Paul 24 Bradley, Katharine 85n25 Brahm, John 141 “braiding” 3, 4 Brooke, Rupert 13, 230 Brooks, Peter 227 Buchan, John 151 Buck, Percy 73 Burckhardt, Jacob 187 Burmese Days (Orwell) 22, 151, 153, 167–170 Butler, Samuel 178 Byatt, A. S. 11, 15, 16 Calinescu, Matei 40 Carlyle, Thomas 69, 100, 165 Carpenter, Edward 165, 209 Carter, Angela 190 The Casuarina Tree (Maugham) 23, 36 censorship 17n4, 92, 127, 168 Cézanne, Paul 8 Chartism 66 Cheiro 47, 52–54 “A Child is Being Beaten” (Freud) 184n33 Christian Socialism 69 Civil Partnership Act (2004) 234 “civilization” 27 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt) 187

252 Index Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 133 Colette 51–52 Collected Poems (Brooke) 232 Collins, Wilkie 189 Coming Up for Air (Orwell) 172 communism 82, 222n3 Communism, Soviet 164, 166, 221 The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 68, 79, 81, 82 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels) 66–67 Coningsby or, The New Generation (Disraeli) 69 Connolly, Cyril 165, 171, 177–178 Conrad, Joseph 22, 40, 168 contemporaneity 22 Cooper, Edith 85n25 cosmopolitanism 4, 83, 206, 207, 208, 213, 215, 219, 222n10 Coward, Noel 39, 56 Cregar, Laird 158 The Criminal Prisons of London (Mayhew) 15, 189 cross-gendered existence 17n3, 96, 129, 229 Cukor, George 141 Culture and Camouflage (Deer) 141 The Cunninghams (Hall) 189 Darwin, Charles 47, 48 Das Kapital (Marx) 219 Davidson, John 28–30, 34 decadence/the Decadence 4, 5, 23–24, 27, 28–29, 40–41, 47, 141, 155, 168 De Certeau, Michel 3, 5–7, 206, 222n1 Deer, Patrick 141 degeneration 24, 25, 29, 65 Degeneration (Nordau) 24 Delany, Paul 231 De Profundis (Wilde) 199, 200, 239 Derrida, Jacques 50, 51 Desai, Mahadev 211, 212 Diana (and Actaeon) 33, 35 Dickens, Charles 10, 165, 199 Dinshaw, Carolyn 13, 14, 18n43 Dixon, Joy 209 Doan, Laura 15 Don Fernando (Maugham) 166 Downhill (Hitchcock) 5, 46, 51, 53, 56, 58–61 Duckworth, Gerald 97, 99, 104 Dyer, Geoff 12, 241 The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes) 119, 120

economy (rural) 65–68 Edel, Leon 231 Edelman, Lee 13, 18n43, 61, 81, 144–145 Einstein, Albert 8 Eliot, T. S. 4, 144 Ellis, Havelock 34 Eminent Victorians (Strachey) 89–90, 102 Empire (British)/imperial time 8, 22–24, 102–104, 107, 119, 151, 166, 167–168, 231, 239–240 Enemies of Promise (Connolly) 171 Engels, Friedrich 66–69, 81–83 England’s Green and Pleasant Land (Ackland) 67 eschatology 8, 14, 40–41, 105, 136n6 Ethical Socialism 206 event (evential time) 8, 18, 89, 109n7 Fascism 16, 120, 149 Faulkner, William 4 female homosocial desire 12, 17, 71–72 female sexuality 28–30, 75, 76, 80–81 “Female Sexuality” (Freud) 76, 85n25 Firbank, Ronald 228 Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (Brooks) 227 Foucault, Michel 1, 132, 201n5 Fowles, John 189 Frazer, J. G. 47, 48, 144 Freccaro, Carla 18n43 Freeman, Elizabeth 18n43 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles) 189 friendship 11, 12, 34–35, 53, 91, 121, 137n40, 155, 168, 169, 178, 179, 194–195, 198, 211, 235, 237, 240, 246n35 Freud, Sigmund 8–10, 47–50, 54–55, 76, 89, 96, 111n49, 113n71, 113n73, 146, 147, 149–150, 151 Froula, Christine 127, 128 Fry, Roger 8, 88–94, 98–99, 101, 105, 108, 109, 124, 227 future/futurity 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 47, 53, 65, 66, 77, 82, 91, 108, 119, 120, 129, 130, 132, 164, 166, 173, 200, 208, 215, 219, 227, 227–228, 240, 241 Galsworthy, John 88, 122 Gandhi, Leela 209 Gandhi, Mohandas 209

Index 253 Garland, Madge 60 Garnett, David 106 Gaslight (Hamilton) 10, 141, 145–150, 158 Gauguin, Emil 27 Gauguin, Paul 8, 23, 25–27 Gautier, Théophile 4 gay 1, 228 genealogical fiction 7, 12, 88, 122, 210, 236 Ghosh, Amitav 11, 12, 206–222 Gilroy, Paul 13, 228–229, 241–243 Gordon, Major-General Charles George 90, 102–104 Grant, Duncan 99, 105, 106, 108 The Great Derangement (Ghosh) 221 Greek desire 32, 33, 34, 76, 85n25, 220, 231 “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (Freud) 149–150 Halberstam, Judith 18n43 Halbertal, Moshe 208 Hallam, Arthur Henry 194 Hall, Radclyffe 30, 35, 60, 75, 76, 189 Hamilton, Sir Daniel 208, 209 Hamilton, Patrick 5, 141, 142, 145, 147–158, 189 Hangover Square (Hamilton) 10, 141, 150–158 Harman, Claire 74 Hastings, Selina 31, 38, 39 Haxton, Gerald 25, 30–31 Henley, William Ernest 165 Henry James Goes to Paris (Brooks) 227 Herrmann, Bernard 141 heterosexuality 8, 11, 12, 13, 33–34, 39, 55, 60–61, 77, 78, 133, 170–171, 194; culture 40; intimacy 170–171 Hext, Kate 4 Highsmith, Patricia 192 The Historical Novel (Lukács) 12, 206, 213 history 3–4, 6–7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 17n10, 47–48, 81–82, 89, 90, 95, 99, 106, 110n15, 119, 120–121, 129–130, 150–151, 187, 188, 190, 194, 206, 207, 218, 219, 222n1, 228, 229, 234–235, 236, 241, 243, 244n5 The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 1 Hitchcock, Alfred 5, 46, 47, 51, 56, 58–61, 141 Hitchens, Christopher 181 Hobsbawm, E. J. 67

Hobson, J. A. 239 Hodgson, Vere 12 Hollinghurst, Alan 1, 12–13, 227–243 Holloway, John 165 Homage to Catalonia (Orwell) 175 homophobia 10, 137n29, 144, 164 homosexuality (female) 75, 137n27, 137n29, 228 homosexuality (male) 1, 40, 62n30, 63n40, 132, 145, 178, 179, 190, 228, 232, 233, 241, 246n38 Horkheimer, Max 9, 10 Housman, A. E. 144 The Hungry Tide (Ghosh) 11, 12, 206–221 Hutcheon, Linda 229 Huysmans, G. K. 4, 40 imperialism see Empire (British)/ imperial time In an Antique Land (Ghosh) 207 In Memoriam (Tennyson) 49 India (Independence and Partition, 1947) 22, 210, 212 interracial sexual desire 25–26, 36–38, 39, 70, 72, 239–243 Intimate Friends (Vicinus) 74 Intimate Journals (Gaugin, Paul) 27 James, David 229 James, Henry 40, 227 James, William 16 Jameson, Fredric 46 Jay, Martin 109 Jefferson, Thomas 182 Jones, Gareth Stedman199 Jones, Nigel 152, 231 June Revolution 65–66, 82 Keats, John 2 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Orwell) 170–172 Keynes, John Maynard 90, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112n53, 119, 120, 122, 235, 239 Kipling, Rudyard 151, 165 The Kitchen (Duncan Grant) 106 Klein, Melanie 10, 34, 50, 96–98, 108, 111n47, 111n49, 113n89, 153, 180, 184n40 Kojève, Alexandre 234 Koven, Seth 190, 197, 198 Kristeva, Julia 165–166, 182n8 Kropotkin, Peter 83 Kucich, John 55

254 Index Lacan, Jacques 13, 47, 96, 97 Lawrence, D. H. 2, 4, 172, 183n23 Leavis, F. R. 4 Le Bon, Gustave 149 Lee, Hermione 135 Lee, Vernon 4, 35, 142 Lenin, Vladimir 210 lesbian 1, 14, 15, 17n3, 17n4, 75, 128, 129, 159n10, 190, 198–199, 202n26, 228, 236 lesbian romance fiction 11, 192 Levenson, Michael 173 liberal individualism 30, 149, 188 The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst) 228, 247n51 Lionnet, Françoise 207 Livesey, Ruth 209 Liza of Lambeth (Maugham) 8, 24 Locke, John 235 The Lodger (Hitchcock) 5, 46, 58, 141, 148, 158 Louÿs, Pierre 4 “Love, Guilt and Reparation” (Klein) 96, 111n49, 184n40 Love, Heather 78 Lowndes, Marie Belloc 5, 46, 148 Lucey, Michael 51 Luckhurst, Roger 49, 51 Lukács, Georg 12, 206, 213, 227, 228 Lyndon, Barré 158 male homosexual panic 10, 61, 97, 164, 179–180 male homosocial desire 78, 150, 164, 174–176 The Man of Property (Galsworthy) 88 The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock) 60 Maori culture 25–27, 42n15 Marcus, Sharon 194 Marcuzzo, Maria 107 Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 246n36 Marx, Karl 47, 66, 68, 69, 79, 81–83, 84n13, 119, 210, 219 The Match Girl and the Heiress (Koven) 197 Matisse, Henri 8 Matz, Jesse 18n27, 109n7 Maugham, W. Somerset 8, 10, 22–25, 29–35, 38–41, 46, 151, 165, 166, 168, 169 Mayhew, Henry 15, 188 Mazzini, Giuseppe 83 Melville, Herman 25

metamodernism 1, 17n2, 228, 229, 238, 244n5 Meyers, Jeffrey 30, 166, 177 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 216–217 Mill, John Stuart 47 miscegenation 25–27 Mitchell, Kate 14 The Modern Movement (Baldick) 5 modern/Modernism 1, 3, 4–6, 8, 16n2, 22, 40, 46, 90–91, 124, 141, 153, 164, 165, 171, 182n1, 227, 232, 243n2, 244n5 modernity 40–41, 42n14, 58, 65, 69, 74, 94, 108, 118, 125, 136n6, 183n23, 207, 214, 216, 229 momentaneity 3 “moments of being” (Woolf) 9, 13, 89, 93, 94, 95, 119, 127, 135 The Moon and Sixpence (Maugham) 23–25, 27, 28, 32 Moore, G. E. 88 Moreau, Frédéric 228 Morris, William 210 Morton, Henry 214 Muñoz, José 18n43 Myers, Frederic 34 Nazism 75, 155–156, 159n4, 164 “Neil MacAdam” (Maugham) 31–36, 38 neo-liberal governmentality 235, 244n5, 245n32, 245n33, 247n52 neo-primitivism 99 Never Say I (Lucey) 51 Newbolt, Henry 151 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 4, 90, 109, 141 Noble, Margaret (Sister Nivedita) 211 Nordau, Max 24, 141 Novello, Ivor 47, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59 now/the Now 2, 3, 8–9, 15, 16, 89, 90, 105, 123, 135 Oedipus complex (theory of) 33, 50, 149 Of Human Bondage (Maugham) 32 Orlando (Woolf) 35 Orwell, George 10, 11, 22, 38, 151–153, 164–182 The Painted Veil (Maugham) 32 The Pargiters (Woolf) 7, 88, 122, 127, 128, 131, 189 parthenogenesis 31

Index 255 Past and Present (Carlyle) 69 Patai, Daphne 164 Pater, Walter 4, 29, 34, 144, 232 Patmore, Coventry 49 patriarchy (Victorian) 1, 9, 89, 90, 150, 164 Paul et Virginie (Bernardin de SaintPierre) 208 “Pen, Pencil and Poison” (Wilde) 142 performativity 81 phenomenology 9, 13, 18n27, 85n30, 109n7, 124, 135–136n3 Picasso, Pablo 8, 105 Poe, Edgar Alan 4 Possession (Byatt) 11, 15 “postcolonial melancholia” 13, 228, 229, 243 Postcolonial Melancholia (Gilroy) 229, 243 Post-Impressionism 8, 25, 89, 90, 92, 99, 105, 106, 108, 120–121, 123, 131, 227 Post-Impressionist Exhibition(s) 89, 105 postmodernism 17n22, 189, 201n7, 229 Pound, Ezra 4 present 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22, 46, 47, 48, 53, 61, 82, 90, 108, 118, 119, 132. 181, 227 The Price of Salt (Highsmith) 192 primitive/primitivism 25, 28, 42n15, 42n16, 48, 99, 219; see also neo-primitivism Prior, Margaret 187–200 prophecy 91, 108, 130, 165, 166, 181, 221, 243 Proust, Marcel 13, 228 Psomiades, Kathy 34 psychoanalysis 1, 9–10, 33n34, 47–50, 55, 59, 75, 89, 91, 95, 96, 102, 111n49, 113n89, 128, 129, 149–150, 153, 160n33, 182n8 “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy” (Freud) 45–55 “The Psychogenesis of Homosexuality in the Case of a Woman” (Freud) 137n29 purity (sexual and racial) 26, 33–35, 176, 179, 232, 244n10 Pym, Barbara 12 queer 1, 13–14, 35, 36, 43n42, 58, 77, 106, 132, 134, 135, 155, 161n35, 175, 184n29, 188, 200, 245n23

racial difference 12, 23, 25–26, 29, 34–35, 39, 70, 244n10 “Rain” (Maugham) 28–30, 34, 38 Reed, Christopher 106 Renaissance (Italian) 187 “reproductive futurism” (Edelman) 81 “reverse” discourse 1 revolution 8, 67, 71, 72, 78, 81–82, 83 Revolutions of February and June, 1848 (France) 65–66, 82 Richards, I. A. 4 Rilke, Rainer Maria 216 Rimbaud, Arthur 4 Rivkin, Julie 230, 231 Rodden, John 164 Romano, Claude 109 Rope (Hamilton) 5, 141–145 Rowlinson, Matthew 47–48 Rushdie, Salman 216–217 Ruskin, John 165, 210 Russell, Bertrand 9, 88, 89, 118–119 Rutherford, Ernest 8 Ryall, Tom 51, 60–61 sadomasochism 10, 29, 34, 147–149, 156 same-sex desire 11, 34, 76, 97, 137n29, 188, 190, 228, 235, 239, 241 savage/savagery 17n12, 26–27, 42n15, 99, 101, 104 Schopenhauer, Arthur 4 Scott, Sir Walter 213 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 10, 36, 78–79, 97 Seshagiri, Urmila 229 Sexual Offences Act (1967) 236 sexual panic 10, 11, 34, 143 Shaw, George Bernard 178, 209 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2 Sherry, Vincent 22, 46 shock 14, 94, 95, 108, 129, 207 A Sketch of the Past (Woolf) 88–96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 119 Smith, Adam 235 Smith, Anna Marie 228–229 social chronicle (novel) 7, 88, 122 social democracy 164, 166, 201 social desire 12, 55, 62n27, 219 The Soul of Man under Socialism (Wilde) 199 Spanish Civil War 94–95, 164, 175–176 The Sparsholt Affair (Hollinghurst) 1, 228, 237

256 Index The Spell (Hollinghurst) 228, 237, 242, 243 Spender, Stephen 164 spiritualism 48, 192–193 Stephen, Leslie 99–101, 104 Stevenson, Robert Louis 4 Stilling, Robert 5 Stockton, Kathryn Bond 18n43 Strachey, James 231 Strachey, Lytton 89–91, 95, 102–105, 164 The Stanger’s Child (Hollinghurst) 12–13, 229, 230, 231, 233, 236 Strauss, Marc Raymond 58 Summer Will Show (Warner) 8, 65, 68, 72, 81 The Swimming-Pool Library (Hollinghurst) 12, 228, 238–241, 245n33, 246n42, 247n47 Symonds, John Addington 232 Taiping Rebellion 103 telepathy 49–50 Tennyson, Alfred 49, 100, 194 theosophy 48 Thomas, Keith 27 Three Guineas (Woolf) 88, 94, 98, 99, 121, 135 time (in queer theory) 13; “A series,” “B series,” in analytic philosophy 118–119, 120; historical and ecological 206–224 Toddy, Dorothy 60 The Trembling of a Leaf 28 Trollope, Anthony 180 Truffaut, François 142 The Tub (Vanessa Bell) 106 Typee (Herman Melville) 25 Underground (Asquith) 60 The Use and Abuse of History (Nietzsche) 3 Vaughn, Marny 105 Versailles Peace Conference 120 Vicinus, Martha 11, 74, 202n26, 203n33 Victorian culture 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 15, 24–25, 46, 47, 66, 82, 165, 190, 194, 195 Victorian period 1, 3, 5, 47, 99, 141, 142, 239 Victorianism 6 virginity 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 245n23

Vision and Design (Fry) 90 Viswanathan, Gauri 209 Vivekanada, Swami 211 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard 34 The Vortex (Coward) 39 Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths 142 Walkowitz, Judith R. 195 The War in the Air (Wells) 181 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 8, 9, 65–83, 189 The Waste Land (Eliot) 144 Waters, Sarah 11, 15, 187–200 Waugh, Evelyn 228 The Waves (Woolf) 144 Webb, Beatrice 106, 107 Webster, John 232 The Well of Loneliness (Hall) 30, 60 Wells, H. G. 181–182 Whitehead, Alfred North 88 Whitman, Walt 2–4, 6, 13, 23, 32, 37 Wilde, Oscar 4, 24, 25, 27, 40, 46, 47, 51–59, 141, 144, 197, 199 Williams, Raymond 16n2, 46, 83n1 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 34 Windrush Scandal 242, 243 247n50 Winnicott, D. W. 50, 51 Winnington, Richard 141 Winter, Jay 181 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 88 Wollen, Peter 61 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) 121 Wood, Michael 5 Woolf, Leonard 5–9, 10, 13, 90, 102, 105–107, 108, 118, 120, 245n23 Woolf, Virginia 35, 75, 88–102, 104–108, 118–123, 125, 127–134, 144, 150, 164, 171, 189, 227, 232, 243 World War I 2, 10, 23, 56, 90, 102, 104, 106, 119–120, 145, 173, 229 World War II 12, 94, 95, 105, 125, 150, 164, 198, 229, 236, 242 The Writing of History (de Certeau) 3, 5–7, 206, 222n1 The Years (Woolf) 7–9, 88, 89, 119, 120, 125, 127, 134, 135 “The Yellow Streak” (Maugham) 36–39 Žižek, Slavoj 47, 149